


To Serve In Hell

by Outer69420



Category: Warhammer - All Media Types, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Action/Adventure, Betrayal, Big Damn Heroes, Codependency, Community: warhammer40kink, Drama, Elf/Human Relationship(s), Eventual Romance, F/F, F/M, Femdom, Femme Fatale, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Master/Slave, Motherhood, Multi, Psychic Abilities, Psychological Torture, Rape/Non-con Elements, Redemption, Romance, Rough Sex, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Sex, Sexual Slavery, Slavery, Smut, Space Marines, Stockholm Syndrome, Torture, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2020-07-31 14:31:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20116636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Outer69420/pseuds/Outer69420
Summary: Theron's world is burned, his wife lost, and his freedom taken. Enslaved by an alien matriarchy and transported to an unearthly dimension of nightmarish torments, mere survival seems an impossible hope until he finds that he is more valuable a commodity than he originally thought. Yet even that may be a double-edged sword, as there are those who would do anything to ensure such a unique being never escapes their clutches.Warhammer 40k, with some artistic license for story's sake.





	1. Hail, Horrors

There are, in the average man’s life, no more than a handful of moments where fate presents him with the opportunity to prove his mettle. Will he cower in the face of a challenge, or will he rise to face it? Does he deserve the life he’s been gifted, or is he unworthy of a boon so rare in this deep, dark universe?

And then there is the one moment that rests at the center of all others, like the fulcrum point of a lever. A man may enjoy - or suffer - decades of life after it, but his choices and experiences in that crucible are so defining as to indelibly define the remainder of his story.

That defining moment lay miles below Theron, somewhere within the ruined city he hurtled towards in an orbital dropship alongside a hundred other armed and armored men. He didn’t know what form that moment would take, nor how he would meet it, but he was fairly certain it would be his death. The pale, wide-eyed faces of his fellow soldiers told him that they expected their own personal stories to end in a similar fashion.

_ Soldiers. _

That wasn’t the right word. Theron wasn’t a soldier, and neither was anyone else aboard that troop transport. They were cannon fodder, scarcely-trained militiamen plucked from every city and farmstead across Bulanel and thrown at an enemy they didn’t understand in the hopes of winning a war they couldn’t win. The only reason the entire company hadn’t mutinied was that they knew to  _ not  _ fight meant a more certain death still.

“Landfall in  _ two  _ minutes!” came a shout from the company’s Captain up front. The man held onto a handle beside the bay doors at the front of the transport to steady himself against the ceaseless shaking of the dropship as it pierced the planet’s atmosphere. Theron doubted that the sharply-dressed officer would be charging out the doors alongside his men - the pistol at his side was for use on mutineers, not the enemy.

“Can’t wait to kill some bugs, yeah?”

Theron glanced to his left to look at the militia member beside him. The man wore a mad grin that looked entirely out of place beneath terror-stricken eyes and a forehead beading with sweat. The humanoid invaders weren’t ‘bugs’ by any stretch of the imagination, but their dark chitinous armor invoked enough of an insectoid image that the name had stuck in the days since their arrival. They’d been so swift and efficient in their attacks on Bulanel’s communication networks that all Theron had to go off of was ill-informed word of mouth. Neither he nor anyone he’d spoken to had any idea what they looked like under their armor.

He did his best to give an enthusiastic nod and mumble something encouraging, but the speed with which his comrade’s smile vanished told Theron he hadn’t managed to feign a stoic front. A mid-air explosion shook the transport, and a jostling of shoulders pushed him hard enough that he was forced to take a sidestep to right himself. His foot slapped down in some shallow wetness, and the distinct scent of piss reached his nostrils over the acrid burn of rocket fuel and ozone. Hopefully it wasn’t his.

“ _ One  _ minute!” the Captain shouted. His voice cracked in fear halfway through the second word, and he pulled down a wall-mounted seat beside him before strapping in and steeling himself for the coming impact.

Another explosion, this one far nearer than the last, shook the transport with such force that it seemed ready to tilt entirely off axis. The repulsor jets on the underside whined and adjusted to compensate, only for more explosions to rattle them from every side. Men were thrown about the transport like rats in a box, bones breaking underneath the weight of dozens of other bodies and equipment being thrown about the cabin. Someone's lasrifle went off, splattering a soldier's head like a ripe fruit.

Just as it seemed as if Theron would meet an ignominious end at the hand of some flying debris or loose weapon, a final roar of rocket jets heralded their slowing descent. One final round of anti-aircraft ordinance ripped a hole in the side of the transport, blasting a tank-sized hole in the wall and vaporizing two full columns of men. Those who weren't killed outright were thrown into their fellows, injuring another few dozen.

Not a ray of sunlight shone through the hole that had been torn open. Only an eerie red glow, broken here and there by bright flashes of light accompanied by an unbearable heat that threatened to cook them alive in their plasteel breastplates.

"Move!" bellowed the Captain, still strapped into his chair a few dozen feet from the hole that had been blown open in the transport. He waved his pistol at it with one hand while he fumbled with his chair's straps. "Move, move!"

It took him firing a round into the heap of men to get them scrambling to their feet and racing towards the exit. Theron found himself knocked onto all fours time and time again, and halfway to the breach realized he'd dropped his rifle. He scurried about in search of a weapon -  _ something  _ to give him the illusion of security - before finally finding an intact one clutched in the frozen grip of a man whose face had been split down the middle by a metal shard.

Bile rose in his throat, and he stumbled away from the mangled corpse before falling down in front of the breach and puking. The image of those bulging eyes and twisted rows of teeth would be burned into his memory for the duration of whatever short life he had left.

Yet even that horror was wiped from his mind when he turned his eyes to the breach before him. The sky was bathed in a deep crimson, as if the entire world were being murdered at once. A wondrous city of glass and steel that had once reached the heavens had been reduced to a twisted wreckage of hollowed out skeletons that continues to burn a slow death. Black, alien strike craft weaved between the buildings, firing at the dropships being jettisoned from the carriers hanging in low-orbit above. Few reached the ground.

Most disturbing of all was the twilight that hung over everything. The sun had vanished from the once-blue skies, replaced by a gaping wound in space that gave a view into a hellscape of swirling red-and-violet energies. Diaphanous tendrils spread outward from the tear, clutching at the planet greedily. The invaders' ships streamed outward from it in seemingly unending columns, like locusts come to strip the planet clean of every last shred of goodness.

Vision swimming and mind reeling, he cast his eyes downward and took in a gasping lungful of air - he had forgotten to keep breathing. His head throbbed from the unnatural wrongness of it all.

"Did you not hear me, soldier?" said the Captain behind him. Heavy footsteps sounded out as the man approach. "Out that door, or I'll-"

A bolt of green plasma sailed over Theron's head and cut the officer's words short. Hot viscera splattered over Theron's turned back, and he clambered out of the transport in a blind panic, eyes blinking madly against the swirling dust and biting embers as he searched for anything resembling safe cover. Red lasrifle bolts and green plasma shot through the air in a deadly crossfire, each one briefly illuminating some shrouded figure in the hazy chaos. All around him men screamed and died, their chests burned through and legs sliced in two by the unending salvos he himself only narrowly avoided.

The debris kicked up by the fallen dropships began to settle, and the hundred-man company that had charged forth from the transport was cut down ever faster. Theron spotted the crumbled remains of a low wall ahead of him and slid to cover. Just as he did, he saw where the enemy fire was coming from. A large, covered skiff hovered between two fallen buildings, beating the ground with repulsor jets and kicking up a cloud of ash. Tall, lithe figures clad in spiked black armor leapt down from the vehicle in groups of three or four at a time, looking every bit the demons he had heard them described as. They emerged from the cloud at a sprint, spreading out to take firing cover just as he had.

With his back pressed against the concrete and his eyes pointedly turned away from the otherworldly horror above, he gripped his rifle firmly in his hands and spun about on his knees to face the approaching invaders. The moment he stuck his head out, a salvo of fire erupted on his position, chipping away at the wall and cutting down the two members of his company who were desperately racing to seek cover alongside him. Something hot struck his head with enough force to send him sprawling to the ground. His helmet rolled off when his head struck dirt. Bright plasma ate away at the left side of it like a cancerous blight, turning the thing into a useless hunk of molten metal and plastic.

From there the onslaught only intensified. The dropship he had fled was easily a hundred feet away, the path to which was strewn with dead bodies. Many of them looked to have been cut down while attempting to flee back towards the deceptive safety of their spent transport. Those few living souls who remained fell over bodies and debris, and their clumsiness earned them quick ends at the hands of the advancing invaders. Less then a minute later, the battle ended, and the only sound that remained was the clatter of armor as the attackers moved towards him.

"Tul coranagh, Mon-keigh!" came a hollow, taunting voice over the thrumming jets of the alien skiff. A chorus of shrill laughter followed alongside another round of plasma that chipped away at what little remained of his cover. Bits of concrete peppered his hair as he looked for some way,  _ any  _ way to flee the certain death stalking towards him.

But there was nothing within reach save the mangled corpses of his comrades. The nearest cover was dozens of feet away, and his attackers were sure to have every available weapon trained on his position now that he was the only one remaining. His hands trembled so much that his rifle nearly slipped free of his sweaty grip, and blood dripped from cuts on his forehead before mixing with the tears rolling down his cheeks.

Why him? Why here, and why now? All he'd ever wanted was to live a quiet life - and all he desired in that moment was to see his wife's face before he ended up another lifeless body face-down in a pile of ash.

"Please, Gods, help me." He turned his gaze to the bloodied sky and blinked the tears from his eyes. "Someone help me."

No answer came, except for another jeering shout from the approaching invaders in their hideous, guttural language. With a final sigh of resignation he clutched his rifle in his lap and drew up his knees, no longer caring if he even managed to take any of his would-be murderers with him to the grave.

As he closed his eyes, a faint whistle appeared behind the sounds of distant warfare, growing in intensity with such speed that a few short seconds later it felt as if his eardrums might explode. His eyes snapped open and he looked directly upward just in time to catch some large mass falling towards the ground between him and the approaching invaders. The ground shook from the impact, shattering his cover and throwing him to the ground for the third time in as many minutes. Crumbled buildings collapsed further all around the site of the massacre, covering the area in a new cloud of choking debris.

Plasma fire scorched the air, and Theron cringed against the fearful knowledge that the end had come. When he failed to feel the fiery impact of his enemy's weapons, he squinted through the haze to see that they had forgotten his presence entirely. Every one of the thirty-odd creatures, to a man, had their glowing green rifles trained on an oddly-shaped mass of gray metall in the center of their midst. It had the look of a mechanical flower with petals on all six sides, ready to bloom. Like a one-man drop pod, but  _ far  _ too large for any one man. Plasma burns pockmarked the sides, though they look to have had no effect on its armor. A few of the invaders approached it warily, spurred onward by a figure aboard the alien skiff. He wore black and purple armor, and towered even above the others of his kind.

Yet none were a match for what was carried to Bulanel by that drop pod. With a hiss of pressurized air the doors on all six sides dropped open, crushing two of the invaders like bugs. More dust billowed into the air around the collapsing doors, partially obscuring from view the massive figure that charged out of the pod into the nearest grouping of invaders. It was taller than any of them, clad in gleaming armor of gold and crimson that seemed to shine with a light of its own. Immense pauldrons shifted about its shoulders with each swing of its saw toothed sword and each sweeping arc of its oversized bolter pistol.

Gangly limbs were severed in single cuts, bodies were crushed whole in their armor, and heads were detonated with expertly-placed shots from a gun that always seemed to fire true. The invaders aboard the skiff fired down from their skiff, caring little whether they hit their doomed allies, and were met by a spray of bolter fire that took out their vehicle's repulsor jets, forcing them to leap down to safety while their vehicle went into an uncontrollable tailspin.

The tallest of the aliens, notable for the purple coloring the joints of her armor, was the last to abandon ship. She stood poised on the edge as it swept through the air above the melee, waiting with knees bent and shoulders drawn up to her helmet. Two curved daggers passed from her belt to her hands, and she leapt into the fray, digging both blades into her hulking enemy's back.

The newcomer to the battle let out a furious bellow that was audible even over the exploding skiff and collapsing building. It was deep, and angry, and far louder a roar than Theron had ever thought a man could make - but there was no mistaking the fact that it was a man who had made it.

Theron hadn't moved a muscle since he had first sat up. Shock, fear, and the unreality of it all had sapped his muscles of the energy to move and robbed his mind of the will to do so. The man's cry dragged him back to reality, however dimly, and he again became aware of the fact that he had a weapon in his hands. One which, he prayed as he raised the sights level with his eye, still worked. The armored man had taken out half the invaders' numbers through sheer shock and awe, but he was finally beginning to buckle beneath the weight of their superior firepower. He raised one gauntleted forearm in front of his helmeted head to block the incoming plasma bolts, while swiping at his back with the other to try and grab the man clinging to his back by two blades.

The pair swung about wildly, until finally the black-armored invader came into view. Through his sights, Theron saw the invader yank out one of the knives and point it at a gap between his opponent's helmet and neck guard. He thrust forward, and Theron fired.

The lasrifle bolt seemed to simply disappear into the fray, and for a moment Theron wasn't certain he had even fired with a full charge. Then the invader on the man's back went limp, and the hulking figure stumbled backwards before smashing him into the side of a concrete slab. That knocked the dead alien free, and the armored man let out a triumphant cry before launching back into the slaughter with renewed vigor. Theron watched in awe as twenty aliens were reduced to ten, then five, and then to two who simply took off running through the remains of a fallen building. The man took off after them, blade and bolter in hand, smashing through downed pillars of once-pristine marble as if they were made of paper mache. The sound of gunfire accompanied the pursuit long after the trip disappeared from view, until eventually even that vanished, and Theron was left alone.

His unexpected victory was no more easy to process than his impending death had been. For a time he simply stood there, rifle in hand, gaping in awe at the twin armies of dead to his fore and rear. A glance backwards confirmed he was the only of his number to have survived, so he began cautiously working his way towards the ones who had slaughtered them. He stopped at the body of an invader whose legs had been torn off at the waist. Theron had somehow missed that during the chaos of the melee. Entrails spilled out of his torso, and blood soaked into the burnt grass beneath him.

_ Red  _ blood.

Not blue, or green, or anything else he would have expected of bugs. A tap with a rifle butt confirmed that the thing's armor was undoubtedly metal, though it felt very light when he nudged the body with his foot. Panels with etched demonic faces, none human but all humanoid, adorned the armor's curved pauldrons and protected the gaps where the pieces didn't quite overlap. The creature's helmet was tall and comical at the top, but otherwise looked to be designed to house something resembling a human, with two eye slits and a long nose slit, all covered in smooth plastic that Theron couldn't quite see through.

His curiosity demanded satisfaction. He leaned down and tried to pry the helmet off to get a look at what was underneath, but found that the armor - and quite possibly the head inside - had been malformed by a blow from the armored man. Unable to wiggle the helmet off, Theron went to another body and fiddled with the clasps holding it to the jumpsuit underneath, only to earn a nasty electrical shock that put him on his back and nearly stopped his heart.

With a groan he rolled over onto his stomach and blinked the stars filling his vision. As the black faded and reality returned, his eyes fell on another fallen invader, this one isolated from the rest of the group. He lay on his side, smoke wafting up from the left side of his breastplate. There was a sliver of white visible just above his neckline, and his helmet was tilted at an odd angle.

_ Skin. _

Theron picked himself up and approached the figure. An angular jawline and a few strands of dark red hair peeked out from underneath the helmet, which Theron tentatively nudged with his foot to reveal a pair of very pale, but very human-looking lips. Heart pounding and palms sweating, he placed his hands on either side of the helmet and dragged it across the ground as he wiggled it off of the invader's head. He still might well die that day, but he would be the first person he'd ever met who knew what his enemy looked like underneath the demonic armor - let alone  _ killed  _ one.

More features revealed themselves as he slid the helmet off. The alien was pale, as if it had never seen sunlight. Perhaps that was why they'd blocked out Bulanel's sun with that horror above. His head was longer and features more angular than a human's, though everything was where it should have been. His eyes were slanted downward at a nearly diagonal angle, and his eyebrows the same. His dark red bangs were swept over one eye, and the excess hair bundled up in a bun behind his head.

With the helmet all the way off, he began to doubt that he was looking at a male at all. The nose was too petite, the eyelashes too long, and the build to lithe. As his gaze traveled back up her body and returned to her face, he noted the near-total blackness of her eyes, which was broken only by mottled irises of fiery orange. And as he mused at the fact that he hadn't noticed her open eyes at first glance, a gauntleted hand wrapped around his throat.

Theron let out a choking gasp and tried to scramble away, but the alien's grip might as well have been a vice. She rolled to her knees, then got to her feet, all while keeping her eyes trained on his and fingers clenched around his throat.

"Mon-keigh brah chamair," she said, bearing her bloodied teeth in an animalistic snarl.

He swung his feet in a mad attempt to break free, ineffectually beating at her armored stomach with his boots while he tried to peel her hand from his neck. Her grip grew tighter, breathing became impossible, and as his vision darkened his eyes drifted up towards the sky and the wisps of alien energy seeping in from whatever nightmare these creatures had crawled out of. A sharp pressure appeared on the right side of his chest, growing in strength until the alien's blade pierced his flesh and sunk into the depths of his ribcage. One by one his senses went out, until all he was left with were the whispered regrets still flitting about in a brain whose lights had nearly gone out.

And in the blink of an eye, reality returned. He was again kneeling beside the seemingly-dead alien, her helmet in hand. Her eyes were closed, his wounds were gone, and her hands were on the ground beside her instead of around her throat. Had it been a dream? A vision? The hallucination of a fear-addled mind?

As Theron tried to process what had just happened to him, he perceived the barest twitch of movement within the alien's gaunt features. He wouldn't have noticed it, had he not been watching her with such rapturous terror. In one quick movement he tossed the helmet aside, picked up his rifle, pointed it at her face, and fired. She shoved her gauntleted hand against the barrel the moment he pulled the trigger, shielding her head from what otherwise would have been a point-blank shot. The lasrifle had been fired too recently to have a full charge, but the resulting blast easily blinded Theron and had him pushing to his feet and staggering backwards in a bid to put some distance between himself and the alien.

When his vision cleared, he saw that the woman had rolled onto her knees and was staring in shock at her mangled wreck of a right hand. Her eyes flashed to Theron and she tried to unsheathe her blade from her belt, but the awkwardness of reaching around her torso with her remaining hand made her slow.

Theron charged her.

He never would be able to day exactly why he did so instead of running. It wasn't a choice - only raw instinct. Perhaps anger over being seemingly murdered by her. He had taken on the righteous fury of an entire murdered world and was determined to deliver vengeance on the only deserving being in sight. Or maybe the fear of death had rested on his shoulders for so long that it had become too aggravating a burden to worry over.

His shoulder smashed into her chest, and she nearly teetered onto her back before righting herself. He snatched up the curved knife and drove it at a gap in the armor covering her stomach, but she caught it with her remaining hand just as the tip wedged between the metal plates. Theron grunted and leaned all his weight forward, forcing the blade across her palm and earning a spray of warm blood across hands. The knife met brief resistance as it pressed against her armor's inner lining, then eased again as it began to slide into her flesh.

The alien cried out in anger, released the blade, and grabbed hold of Theron's wrists. But she didn't push him away, as he expected and overcompensated for. Instead she pulled him in at the same moment he pressed forward, allowing the blade to sink all the way in up to the hilt. She then tilted her chin up, drew her head back, and brought it crashing down on Theron's. His own head exploded in pain, and warm wetness bathed his forehead. Again and again she headbutted him, each time putting his vision in blackness for a little bit longer. He tried to let go of the knife and pull away, but her grip was just as irresistible as it had been in his vision. Their second fight ended the same as the first, his senses dulled by the repeated blows until he could no longer feel them.

Still, he was thankful for the trial run of death that date had seen fit to give him. This time, when oblivion extended its icy grip in welcome, he remembered to think of his wife.


	2. Hate At First Sight

When Theron awoke, it was immediately clear that he hadn't made it to the afterlife. For one thing, there are no splitting migraines in paradise. The endless fields smell of flowers and clean air, not piss and sweat and vomit. There's a clear blue sky that stretches on to infinity, instead of a rusted ceiling ten feet above his head. And there are golden-trellised angels, not wide-eyed teenage boys with short, wavy brown hair matted to their forehead by sweat and grease.

The youth stared down at Theron, watching wordlessly as he slowly awoke to the nightmare that unconsciousness had given him brief respite from. Every inch of his body ached, from his split scalp to the floor beam digging into his back. The worst was his wrist, which throbbed painfully in time with his heartbeats. Still groggy and without the benefit of full bodily awareness, he lifted up his right arm to find that everything from the wrist up was gone. Bloody rags were wrapped around the stump.

"It was the best I could do," whispered the young man. "Sorry."

Theron let his arm drop back to his side, and immediately regretted it when the impact sent a fresh surge of agony shooting through the mangled limb. Every shallow breath was a torment, and seemed to catch on some broken rib or ruptured organ.

"Where am I?" said Theron.

“I don’t know. They keep moving us. We’re in a-”

An angry shout echoed through the claustrophobic room, followed by the wailing of a child. The young man beside him cringed at the noise, drawing his shoulders up to his ears and hunching down closer to Theron, as if afraid he might be overheard.

“We’re in a spaceship," the man whispered. "I know that much.”

Theron tilted his head to the side and saw that he was surrounded by a mass of people, none of whom seemed to be paying him much attention. Families huddled around their children, couples clung to each other in fear, and solitary men sat with legs folded and eyes fixed forward in a thousand-yard stare. Some of the latter were wearing the same olive drab military uniforms as Theron, but the rest of the prisoners looked to be ordinary people plucked from every conceivable walk of life.

"What happened to my hand?"

He clung to a small hope that the severed limb had either been the last remnants of a fever dream, or another too-real vision like the one he'd experienced back on Bulanel. Unwilling to brave another look at the stomach-churning sight, he tried to wiggle the fingers of his right hand against the floor and found that he could not.

The man shrugged. "I found you like that in the first ship they put us on. Someone must have dragged you onboard."

There was only one possible candidate that came to mind - the alien who had headbutted him into unconsciousness. Theron brought a hand to his forehead and found the area swollen and tender. The lightest touch sent fresh waves of pain coursing through his skull, and brought to mind the last thought that had passed through his mind before unconsciousness.

"Did they put everyone here?" Theron rolled over onto his front and tried to push himself up with only one shaky arm. "I need to find my wife."

The young man hovered his hands under Theron lest he fall back down, and muttered some cautioning words as the latter rose to his feet and began working his way through the surrounding crowd. His limbs ached from Gods knew how many hours of disuse, and his sense of balance was far from perfect after the concussion he'd been given. Screaming children, sobbing women, and shouting men pierced his ear drums while the offal of hundreds of imprisoned souls assaulted the rest of his senses. 

He went from group to group, describing his wife and asking if they'd seen her, but the best he got were bewildered shakes of the head - the worst was the derisive laughter at someone who dared hold onto hope in so hopeless a situation. Eventually Theron ran into an old man, who told him he was looking for someone just as Theron did the same. Somehow, hearing his own pleading echoed so perfectly made his searching seem an absurd exercise in futility, and he returned to the young man who had tended to him, sitting cross-legged and adopting the same glazed-over stare he'd seen on dozens of his fellows.

"I can't find her," he said blankly.

"They split people up a lot," said the young man. "But they mix them up sometimes too. Maybe you'll find her when they move us."

The most Theron could muster for that sparse hope was an absent-minded nod. None of the last few days seemed real, and he felt unable to consider the future before he'd truly processed what came before. Tears in reality, alien raiders, and a planet turned to ash.

"Are you not with your family?" said Theron.

The boy shook his head. "I haven't seen them in years." He then added a hasty, "I hope they're alright."

Theron’s first thought was that the boy must be a runaway, but another glance at his baggy clothing revealed them to be distressed designer chic rather than genuinely worn-down garments, and his unwashed look was shared by everyone else who’d endured the shock-and-awe of a xeno invasion. Raised by family friends or an orphanage, maybe.

“I’m sure they are,” said Theron. The boy gave him a weak smile, a polite gesture that Theron himself hadn’t been able to muster the will for when he’d been on the receiving end of such a hollow assurance. Feeling a little guilty, and a little more alive, Theron shifted on the floor to face him and extended his hand in greeting. “I’m Theron.”

The boy reached out to shake it, then hesitated, as if uncertain of whether or not he wanted to bother making acquaintances with someone closer to death’s door than anyone else in that room. Theron followed his line of sight downward, and only then took notice of the fact that he’d offered his rag-bound wrist instead of a hand. He spit out a puff of air between lips cracked from dehydration, and his lips quivered in delirious amusement. Howling laughter followed, shaking his body until his eyes were wet and his chest sore.

No one else in the room cared about the laughter of a madman until the boy seated in front of him joined in as well, at which point everyone fixed the two with stares varying from concerned to angry. A lone lunatic was no danger, but the fear that his mental breakdown had become contagious was enough to have them moving away to give the laughing pair a wide birth, even if it meant cramming in even closer to each other.

"I'm Max," said the young man as he wiped away a tear.

Theron gave him his left hand in greeting, and with it, a genuine smile. It was the first he'd shown in weeks, and, likely the last he'd ever enjoy.

  
  


* * *

  
  


There is no such thing as a 'gradual' arrival at a destination, but Theron's felt particularly abrupt. He was awoken from fitful sleep by a violent rumble that shook the room and it's terrified occupants, followed by a sharp metal screech that passed through the hull of whatever ship they'd been forced. Scalding steam billowed out from grates in the floor near the rear of the room, forcing those prisoners in the back towards the front of the ship. Theron grabbed Max by the arm and hauled him to his feet before they could be trampled under the wave of human detritous.

"Hold onto me," said Theron.

Max obeyed without question, grabbing hold of Theron's tunic from the rear while Theron kept his left hand wrapped around the other man's left wrist. It felt good to protect someone younger and smaller than himself, and better still to have some sort of ally in this madness, even if they'd only met a few hours prior.

The hiss of hydraulics rose over the roar of steam, heralding the opening of a set of twin doors at the front of the room, opposite the steam-flooded portion of the room. There were too many people between him and the doorway to see what was on the other side, but the way the crowd pushed back towards the boiling heat to their rear told him they didn't like what they saw on the other side. Furious shouting followed, shrill and guttural, and not human in the slightest. Slowly, the crowd again resumed it's steady flow towards the doorway, led by those unfortunate souls who were closest to it. Though he couldn't see them pass through the threshold into the darkness beyond, the way the crowd grew thinner with the passage of time told Theron that they were indeed being led from the confines of the room.

"We're going  _ somewhere,"  _ said Theron. It was as obvious a statement as one could make, but stress and uncertainty had always had a way of loosening his tongue.

When Max failed to respond with even the most wordless of muttered acknowledgements, Theron glanced back to see that the boy was shaking like a leaf, his eyes so wide with rapturous fear that they seemed to be featureless orbs of white. The same could be said of his face, which had lost what little color it had. His hands twitched like a spastic's, and his knees rattled against each other at a rapid pace. A dark patch of wetness ran down the fabric of his pants, from groin to inner thigh. Theron quickly looked back forward so as not to induce further shame, but Max hadn't even seemed to take notice of the fact that he'd been looking, much less that he'd wet himself.

"Mon-keigh clea ann ach!"

A familiar epithet rang out ahead, in that same inhuman echo that had come the moment the doors opened. When the number of prisoners between him and the door narrowed down to only a few ranks, he finally caught sight of those who were driving them from the room. Twin statuesque figures clad in black armor stood just outside the doorway, towering head and shoulders above those they pointed their rifles at. Beside each of the xenos were two bedraggled humans in filthy tunics, who shackled the new arrivals with practiced ease. They were putting them into two columns of chain gangs, slapping manacles on their wrists and ankles, the latter of which was connected by a heavy length of chain to the person ahead and behind. The process was driven at a frenetic pace by the watching xenos, who screamed foul, incomprehensible utterances at every human who passed through the threshold.

"Men are brave," Max muttered behind him. He said it to himself over and over, until the words became as much a part of the background noise as the steam and cries and clank of chains.

Theron trembled from the pain radiating outward from his bloody stump, but for anyone who looked his way, fear would have seemed to have surprisingly little hold on him in that moment. Of all the prisoners in that crowd, he was the only one whose eyes scanned the reddened darkness ahead in search of what was to come next. Not that he wasn't gripped by a fear deeper than any he'd ever know. But unlike Max, it wasn't a simple terror of death or torture that had sunk it's cold claws into his gut. Rather, it was the million possibilities that ran through his mind when he considered what his wife might be going through at that exact moment. He wasn't sure which made him more sick with guilt and fear - the fact that he wasn't there for her to hold onto, or the possibility that she'd found someone else to protect her.

They came to the doorway, and Theron maneuvered them to the right to ensure they'd he and Max would end up in the same line. A massive hall stretched out before them, it's incalculable size rendered even more mind-boggling by the endless hours he'd endured on the claustrophobic transport he just stepped out from. The space was dark, but a dim red glow shining from miles ahead at the far end of the hallway gave enough light to see by. A furious shout from one of the tall, armored figures beside the doorway had him turning his eyes downward, away from the helmeted face of the alien bellowing obscenities into his ear.

His eyes were shackled, then his wrists, and he was jabbed in the shoulder by the xeno's rifle to get him moving before the chain connecting him to the person in front of him went taut. Fresh pain surged through his wounded arm, and he hurriedly staggered forward to avoid any further 'encouragement'. The chain running behind his ankle shackles went tight and then loose again, telling him that Max had been manacled and then sped into line after him. He risked a glance back at the young man, but in the dim light could make out little more than the outline of his slumped shoulders and down-turned head. Some xeno in the vicinity shouted in that familiar tone of hateful impatience, and Theron turned his gaze back to his feet.

It was impossible to tell what the words meant or who they were directed at, but he wasn't about to draw attention to himself when he had so little idea of what sort of situation they were in. The two lines of chained slaves continued their slow shuffle down the hall, which itself was big enough to contain any single starship that man had ever made. That would seem to indicate the transport had arrived on the xenos' planet, or perhaps docked at a space station. A coalition of nations had constructed one in orbit of Bulanel's moon. Who was to say that xenos who could tear holes in space couldn't construct ones a hundred times the size?

Dark shapes flitted in and out of the edges of his vision, vanishing from site each time he risked a glance towards the vaulted ceiling. Alien screams and human crying filled the air, mixing with the rhythmic rattle of metal chains to create a nightmarish chorus for their trek through the hall. Theron looked to his right and was surprised to see another pair of chain gangs moving alongside the two that had left his prison transport. More appeared on either side in the following minutes, and he came to realize that the central hallway was an artery of sorts, gathering up lines of prisoners from smaller corridors that converged upon it. There was no telling how many their lines numbered, as the columns of prisoners continued past the narrow glow of the red light shining at the end of the hallway. Everything about the hall's construction seemed designed to confound any attempts to get one's bearing.

The chain running behind Theron's ankles went taut, causing him to stumble into the man in front of him. He looked back to see Max moving with a noticeable limp that had slowed him down considerably, and was in danger of bringing the entire line to a halt.

"You need to walk faster," hissed Theron. If he didn't, then he was in danger of drawing unwanted attention to himself. That could easily have meant death in a situation like theirs.

Max lifted up his head and gave him a teary-eyed look of anguish. "My leg," he wheezed. "It really hurts."

Theron slowed his own pace just enough to let Max catch up to him, then slipped his left arm under Max's right, taking much of the weight off of his bad right leg. Max's leg was wet, though not from urine - this warm dampness was on the outside of his thigh. 

_ Blood. _

They passed a simply-robed woman who wasn't part of the chained lines. She stood in between two of the columns of prisoners with hands clasped and face turned towards the ground. A strip of cloth that looked to be torn from her garments was wrapped around her eyes. Theron's legs seized in fright when she turned her sunken, cloth-covered eye sockets towards him.

"If you fall, you die," cried the woman.

A shove from whoever was behind Max in the line got the two men moving again. A short time later he heard the woman's warning again, and realized that she was simply turning her voice towards whatever off-pattern rattling of chain indicated an out-of-step prisoner. The time spent letting his eyes wander allowed him another conclusion - each line consisted entirely of one gender. Their prison transport, like all the others, had been split into men and women when they'd passed through the door. He might have let his mind ponder the 'why' of that fact, were it not for the horrifying implication of just how quickly his hopes of finding his wife were dwindling.

"I can't," said Max. "I can't."

His voice was strained, his visage pale, and the words came between rasping breaths. A moment later he slumped against Theron's side, nearly pulling them both to the ground.

"Hey!" said Theron. "We're almost there. It's just a little further."

That was certainly a lie given the sheer length of endless mausoleum stretched out before them, but it was enough to get the youth moving again. As they continued their slow passage onward, the light at the end of the hall grew bright enough that Theron was forced to avert his eyes from it, though the eerie red glow never seemed to fully penetrate the immense breadth and height of the passage. 

The dark shapes he had taken notice of before revealed themselves to be more of their captors, who flew above them on thin metal discs no larger than a manhole cover. A subtle shift of their weight would send the featureless vehicle careening off in whichever direction the disc tilted, allowing the xenos to keep a vigilant watch over huge spans of prisoners. Each of the guards had a coiled whip ready in hand, and at least a few had small firearms clipped to their waist as well. Occasionally one would stop, shout at the prisoners below them, and crack their whip across the back of whichever unlucky soul had happened to attract their ire. 

Mostly, though, they simply watched.

There was something uniquely discomforting in their masked stares - as if Theron and his fellows were being leered at, and not simply watched. To these aliens, this mass procession of human suffering seemed to be the most fascinating sight imaginable. And as they drew closer to the other end of the hall and the space became better lit, other onlookers came into view. Railed balconies lined the heights of the corridor's walls. The nearest of the parapets was easily thirty feet up, far above the reach of even the most vengeful prisoner. There were hundreds of the platforms, and stop each stood a small grouping of xenos. The hushed chattering that rose up from the groups created a pall of noise that smothered even the shrillest of wailings.

The xenos all had the same basic appearance of the one Theron had fought back home, with the same variations one would expect of a people who looked just human enough for their alienness to be all the more disturbing. They were almost uniformly taller than the average man, though there were a few exceptions. Skin color ranged from stark white to ashen grey and a sickly green, while hair ran the gamut of every conceivable style and color, with a ponytail seeming to be the most favored.

Most of the groups consisted of a few armed and armored guards - some helmeted, some not - standing watch beside an especially bizarre-looking woman. The garb of the latter ranged from blindingly colorful to pitch black, and from obscenely minimalistic to absurdly overwrought with endless frills and layers. Their bodies were as varied as their garments, with some wielding six arms and others bearing fleshy spines across their bony shoulders. The more Theron saw, the less sure he became that he was looking at members of a single species.

Far ahead of them, a platform that had seemed to hang in the air in the center of the hall revealed itself to be connected to both walls by narrow catwalks of dark metal twisted into flowery designs. This platform was larger than the rest, and its central location demanded the attention of even the most terrified prisoners. Each turn of the head upwards was met by furious shouting from the airborne guards, whose warnings were translated by the eyeless human women stationed between the lines of chained captives.

"If you look, you die!"

Had that warning come a few moments sooner, Theron may have listened, but he looked just long enough for his eyes to fall upon a familiar figure in the cluster of two-dozen xenos above him. The woman he had fought on Bulanel had been notable for her size, and that was no different here. She wore the same purple-accented armor of black metal, and held her helmet under one arm, using the very hand Theron had reduced to ashes.


	3. A Woman Of Wealth And Taste

How many times had she walked these shadowed halls? How many times had she watched over the procession of the wretched, while her enemies and allies alike took the rare public appearance to look for any sign that the vicissitudes of age had dulled her faculties enough for them to make their move?

Far too many to count, and enough that she briefly entertained fantasies of joining the Haemonculi in their self-imposed solitude in the depths of the City. There, at least, there would be fresh misery. Tedium was the one pain that no Drukhari had ever drawn succor from, and she was no exception. She would gladly foist this duty onto her heir, if one existed who could shoulder it. Let _ them _ suffer these repetitive triumphs and the social games that accompanied them. Games were no fun when there was no chance of losing, and it had been far, far too long since she'd enjoyed the hatred of an equal. There were always greater heights of power to be sought, but that vaunted status carried its own brand of drudgery. Even if she took a stab at placing herself above all the other Houses of Commoragh, what would that earn her other than a simple multiplying of her dull-minded opponents?

"I think I want to die," she whispered into the darkness before her. The procession around her drew to a halt as she did.

"Lady Moradys?" came a voice behind her, and about a foot above. Her Navarch's presence grated on her now more than usual, particularly because she had made the decision to wear her battle armor, the blood-rusted joints of which grated against themselves with each movement. It would be one thing if Ruhara had shunned the usual finery of a Triumph as some element of a deeper social maneuvering, but her mind did not work in such ways. She simply took pride in what she saw as a warrior's victory.

What pride was there to have in victory over Mon-keigh?

"Nothing," said Moradys. And it truly was only an idle muse, quenched at the first thought of slipping into the hungry oblivion that waited at the end of everything. There was a Goddess, after all, and she hated every last one of her children.

Moradys resumed walking down the hallway, and one of the chains hooked into her belt went taut. She gave it a good yank in response, turning the pitiful whimper that followed her everywhere into a tortured cry of agony. On the other side of her belt, the second of the two chains rattled in expectant fear. Once upon a time, those sounds might have produced some small flicker of emotion within a heart that had grown ossified with untold years and the experiences that come with them. Now, they simply grated on the ears.

“How many of these arrivals will I be watching over?” said Moradys.

Ruhara was silent for a few footsteps, leaving the gasping whimpers of Moradys’ fashion accessories as the sole voices in the corridor. Up ahead, the crimson light of the main arrival hall had grown bright enough that Moradys could measure out the distance to the viewing bridge she would be standing on for the next 40-odd hours. The desire to get free herself from the cramped confines of the smaller side hall drove her to quicken her pace, resulting in the chains at her belt going tight once again.

"48," Ruhara finally said.

Moradys stopped and spun about mid-step to face her Novarch. The rotation wrapped the righmost chain about her waist, and with no extra give to it, the hook on the far end tore right through the flesh of the slave it was embedded in. It was still too dark to see well, but she heard the distinctive thud of a naked body falling to the marbled floor.

"I seem to remember sending you off with a nice round number," said Moradys. "What happened to the other two?"

She lifted the loose chain from her belt and found the hook on the end. There was quite a bit of meat hanging from it. After shaking the flesh loose, she walked back to the fallen slave, dragging the living one with her, and knelt down to fumble for her fallen form. Blood pooled beneath the Mon-keigh woman, wet and warm, and the sheer amount told Moradys that she would be forced to continue on with a disgustingly lopsided slave escort. She dropped the hook to the floor and snorted in exasperation.

"The Mon-keigh destroyed one transport before it made landfall," said Ruhara.

"Not those_ colonists," _Moradys said incredulously.

"The Terrans! I told you how ferociously they pursued us. One of their frigates even dared to follow us into the Warp."

Moradys stood up, went to her remaining slave, wrapped the free length of chain around her frail neck, and pulled.

"So that is why you only came back with a single Astartes. Because you fled."

Emaciated hands swung up from the darkness beneath Moradys to claw at the metal noose digging into their owner's neck. There was no skin on the palms, leaving them a sticky mess. The same had been done to both slaves' feet, as well as their buttocks. There was something artful about those skeletal wraiths hobbling around on knees and elbows. Only when they were a pair, though - one slave would look ridiculous.

"As you taught me, Lady Moradys! Run to fight another day. Fight where you are strong and your enemy is-"

"And the other?" interrupted Moradys.

"Lost on the return. The navigators say a Warp storm took it. Who am I to deny a sacrifice to She Who Thirsts?"

Ruhara muttered something inaudible, then traced the half-circle shape of a warding sigil across her armored chest. The choking gasps of the slave grasping at Moradys' forearms grew weaker and further apart, and with one last yank on both ends of the chain wrapped around her neck, stopped completely. The nail-less hands that had clawed so ineffectually at their tormentor dropped down to the ground, and Moradys let the body and chain fall with them.

"I sent you away with 50 slave haulers, and you returned with 48. A planet of four billion, and the only thing of interest you bring me is arena fodder. Do I have that right?"

"Yes," said Ribara.

_ Why did she answer so quickly? _

Moradys turned to Ruhara and walked towards her with slow, measured steps that echoed flatly in the cold silence of the narrow hall. The house guards between the two pressed into the walls to make way for their Archon, seeming to fade into the inky blackness of the marble facade until only the two other women remained. Ruhara was tall among the Drukhari, and Moradys notably short among her kin, but the difference in stature only seemed to lessen as the distance between them grew smaller, and Ruhara's presence shrunk with her slumped shoulders and bowed head.

"Imagine for a moment that someday soon, in your ineptitude, you finally manage to strike the bedrock of the boundless well of second chances I have given you. Can you do that?"

Her face pointed at the ground, Ruhara nodded and surreptitiously moved her hands behind her back in an effort, whether conscious or subconscious, to hide from view the limbs that Moradys was most fond of taking. Cutting off a hand was a simple and satisfying way to make everything in life some varying degree more unpleasant for the unfortunate recipient.

"Good. Now, I want you to explain to me why I shouldn't kill you as an example to your replacement."

The corners of Ruhara's lips pressed together in a quivering mask of simmering anger, and her fiery eyes flickered up to Moradys before quickly returning to her feet. It was as close to defiance as she would ever dare come.

"It was not my fault," muttered Ruhara. "A replacement would do no better."

Moradys shook her head. "Pretend I'm not an idiot, and try again. I _ know _ it was your fault. Three million slaves from a planet of _ four billion. _A single prize of note, and not even a particularly special one at that."

"I captured that prize myself," she declared defiantly, holding up the right arm the Shapers had regrown from the wrist up. "For that I paid a mere hand."

Moradys closed her eyes and rubbed her temples as she let out a deep sigh of utter exasperation.

"Which begs the question of _ why _you were leading a raiding party instead of staying aboard the ships I charged you with. What do you think the Kabalites were there for?" 

This time, when Ruhara glanced up at her mistress, her gaze remained there, her irises glowing like embers in the blackness that surrounded them. The animal cunning that lurked within frustrated Moradys, as did the fact that Ruhara seemed so loathe to bring even that simple intelligence to bear.

"I did not _ want _to stay on the ship. The battle had already gone to ground," said Ruhara. Her voice was low, and wavered with fear, but even the fractional amount of defiant edge that seeped in was enough to have Moradys running through a mental inventory of all the different ways she might disabuse her Novarch of the notion that mild insubordination would only be met with mild punishment. That line of thought was stopped short by what Ruhara said next.

"Joining the assault was the honorable thing to do."

Moradys reached up and grabbed the collar of Ruhara's armor, then snapped her arm downward so that the two were eye-to-eye. The strength of the smaller woman was decidedly unnatural, even in that unnatural place among those unnatural beings, and might have broken Ruhara's neck, were she not prepared for it.

"I made it _ very _ clear that I never want to hear you speak that word again," Moradys snarled. "It's not a long list, and I expect you to remember it."

Ruhara nodded, eyes wide with… not quite terror, but at least understanding. She remembered what happened when she had said the word at the _ top _ of the list - and what it was like not being able to speak for an entire cycle of the city's black suns.

A shuffling of metal on stone drew Moradys' attention from her Novarch to the six guards who stood waiting on either side of the narrow hall. She might have forgotten about them, had that single Drukhari kept her bearing just a few moments longer - and that might have spared them what came next. With yet another weary sigh, Moradys released Ruhara. The few seconds that followed, a dimly-lit nightmare of cracked stone, blunted armor, and broken skulls, would have made clear to any who watched that the Archon did not _ need _the guards who attended her. It was a fact Ruhara was already well aware of, so she did not dare move from the lowered position her mistress had forced her into moments before. When Moradys next appeared before Ruhara, there was little about her person to indicate that she had just murdered six woman in as many beats of the heart. Even the few flecks of blood staining her gaunt visage were quickly done away with by a few swipes of a finger.

"I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that it would be far simpler to just kill you. Truthfully, I don't know why I haven't done it already. Familiarity, I suppose."

Moradys gave a cursory look around at the broken bodies she had left on either side of her, as if only then becoming aware of the true extent of her carnage. There was a sort of dissapointment in her expression, though not so pronounced that one might mistake it for regret or empathy.

"How are you going to make this right?" she said. "How am I to make you understand that your actions have consequences?"

The tone of her voice had grown calm, the volume low, and the mood somber. Ruhara knew that her mistress was not one to back away from the path she had settled on, and knew just as well that a calm tone in a moment of anger meant that the actions that followed would speak for themselves. The towering Novarch crumpled to her knees, at last putting her head and shoulders below her mistress.

"Who is your favorite amongst the House slaves?" said Moradys. "And don't you dare Shoma, because I know it isn't."

Ruhara's eyes narrowed beneath her heavy brow. No one knew better than Moradys how much Ruhara hated when she used its Mon-keigh name.

"The old one with the gray hair and the hunched back," Ruhara muttered. "She is quiet and dutiful."

Moradys raised an eyebrow curiously.

"No, you hate her. I've been told you've pushed her down the stairs multiple times. Good on you for trying to lie, though. It's the first bit of cunning you've shown in recent memory."

She placed her hand on Ruhara's cheek and gently tilted her face up towards her own.

"I am going to watch over the Triumph. You are going to call for another set of House guards, and then you will join me."

Ruhara nodded.

"Then, once this celebration of mediocrity has concluded, we'll return home. You'll bring me that golden-haired thing that you slip into your room at night, and I'll rip her innards out through her cunt."

Those words hung in the air like a cloud, one which grew more overbearing as the pressure on Ruhara's cheek grew more noticeable. Her fists clenched in her lap, her chest heaved with heavy breaths, and her jaw tightened until her teeth ground against each other like two opposing gears, but she kept still until the strength of her mistress's grip forced another now from her bowed head.

"Good." Moradys snatched her hand away and spun about on her heels, then began walking swiftly towards the end of the hall, where a screeching chorus of human tragedy awaiting her coming.

"And don't take too long to make your appearance. This celebration isn't all about me, after all."


	4. People Watching

The caterwauling of endless thousands of captives was a truly wretched noise, a horrid assault on the senses that was joined by a wretched stench to make the Mon-keigh miserable company, even if one did not deign to lower their eyes to the shuffling creatures. But if one did, they could add the eyes to the list of organs permanently impoverished for the looking. With each to-be slave that passed through the receiving hall under Moradys' balcony, she took note of some physical peculiarity or affliction that made a mockery of their form. This one was short and bore a potbelly under his tucked shirt. That one was so tall that his proportions were rendered comical, and his musculature left wanting. The Drukhari embraced the individuality of personal expression, to be sure, but there was an intentionality about it that made it beautiful. Not here, with these obscenely short-lived creatures. There was nothing intentional about them, nor the way they lived their lives. Even the unsurety of their gait gave the impression of something bumbling its way blindly from one event to the next.

Were they even conscious? Was there such a thing as 'being' a Mon-keigh, in the way that Moradys was Moradys? She'd occasionally mused about that, and had toyed further with the idea that she was the  _ only _ conscious being in existence. It was a horrifyingly lonely thought. There were those Mon-keigh 'thinkers' who took the discovery of the thing they called a soul as proof of Being, but one need only live within the Warp long enough to see that Spirit did not mean Being. There existed within those endless astral currents powers which burned so bright they made her own look like a flickering candle in comparison - but thoughts had created _ them,  _ and not the other way around.

Moradys wound her fingers around the balcony railing before her, closing her eyes and drawing in a deep breath as she reached out with her awareness. The screams of men, women, and children faded into one another and deepened in pitch until they flattened into an undifferentiated hum of vibrant energy. This was life, thought Moradys. Not the begging of the Mon-keigh as they were taken apart bit by bit, but the faint flicker of emotion that their pleading sparked within her. It was rare these days, and a harder fire to light than it had ever been, but it had become the only thing that staved off the inevitable - that shuddering maw that waited at the end of all things.

She held her palm to her chest, searching over the leather of her bustier for her heartbeat.

"I want to die," she said.

This time, there was nothing. The thought that had produced so thrilling a sensation the first time around brought only a steady continuance of body and mind, neither of which seemed inclined to do anything but continue their slow, plodding march towards ossification. It was a strange thing, to feel simultaneously a stranger to her own faculties, and at the same time to know that those faculties were beyond the reach of even the most arousing stimuli. Her soul was slipping from her grasp, and from that of the world's, into the clutches of something else entirely. The fact that  _ didn't  _ bother her should have bothered her immensely, but it did not - and that was the nature of her sickness.

The balcony shook with heavy footfalls, snatching Moradys from the depths of contemplation, but she did not bother opening her eyes to see who had interrupted her thoughts. There were few women in Commorragh large enough to account for the rattling of the railing in her hands, fewer still who insisted on wearing battle armor to a ceremonial event, and only one who was irritated and brazen enough to make her presence known in the way a child might.

"When you wear armor, there are those who will assume that you fear an attack," said Moradys.

"Then I would have baited them into a trap."

The railing buckled forward with Ruhara's weight, and Moradys was forced to step back for worry of careening over into the lines of shuffling, manacled prisoners passing far below her. What a laugh that would earn from the representatives of the other Houses, who stood watching from either side of the grand hall. Nowhere else in the city could one find such an envious collection of sycophants, gossipers, and backstabbers. The presence of two courtiers from two Houses demanded the presence of the others, until there stood gathered one from every House, top to bottom. Each courtier watched all the others, and the others watched them, as if each were warden of their own panopticon. The slow march of her living plunder was only a sideshow to the silent game being played through countless nods, hand gestures, and carefully-timed eye contact.

"It doesn't matter if you survive," said Moradys. "The others will smell blood, and more attacks will follow. For someone so enamored with their own image, you do a horrible job maintaining it. They already think you slow. What if they knew you were weak, as well?

Her head kept still, Moradys swept her eyes across the width of the hall. It took a moment for her mind to process the vastness her senses had taken in, and to name and categorize each of the dozens of courtiers she had laid eyes on. This one was a threat, that one harmless. This one a former lover, that one a spurned suitor. It took another split-second for her to mentally assemble the vast array of social connections between the courtiers and their Houses, and the remainder of that second for her to decide upon a plan of action.

Moradys' eyes drifted leftwards, towards House Nychta's platform. Four guards stood behind a fifth woman, who wore a beige gown of cured Mon-keigh flesh. Her pale areolas jutted out from two small, toothless mouths, which had been stretched over her breasts into a permanent look of horror. Moradys waited for the woman to give a sign that she knew she was being watched, which came in the form of a nearly imperceptible facial tic. Next, Moradys lifted her shoulder and straightened her fingers as if to give a wave of greeting. Her eyes shot over to House Tenebrim - the party of which was paying her no attention at all - and she hurriedly replaced her hand at her side before fixing her gaze on the procession of slaves. Out of the corners of her vision, she could see three of the Houses display signs of immense interest in the aborted acknowledgement. Why had she chosen House Nychta, a minor player, for her first greeting of the Triumph? Why had the memory of House Tenebrim's presence - that of her chief rival - staid her hand? Let them chew on that bit of meaningless gristle until their teeth fell out. It would give her space to engage freely, without dozens of practiced eyes picking apart her every action.

Moradys looked over at Ruhara, who peered over the railing with a frown on her face and her helmet clutched under one arm.

"Is my hard-won wisdom that displeasing?" said Moradys.

Ruhara closed her eyes. Her frown turned further downwards into an outright scowl that she struggled to contain with quivering lips.

"I have no weakness to hide," she said in a low voice, barely audible over the march of broken souls far below.

"Yes, you do," said Moradys. "And you always seem to be acquiring new ones. I'm starting to wonder if you receive some bizarre satisfaction from having them taken from you."

Those last words had Ruhara's fists tightening around the railing so hard that the metal buckled ever so subtly between them. She remembered those strong hands wrapping around her own neck, and her knees quivered. That body, so lean and tall and powerful. Those broad shoulders, ever drawn up in a guarded posture. That hateful curl of her thin lips that appeared in the corners of Moradys’ vision.

And those eyes, smoldering with a youthful cunning so like her own.

Ruhara peered down from the balcony, her expression rigid with something quite unlike the fury that had filled it only a moment before. Moradys followed her gaze, tracing an imaginary vector towards the lines of slaves until she found what had seized her Novarch's attention. Two captives, one supporting the other under his shoulder, limped along beside each other as they made their way towards Moradys' Triumphal balcony. The one being half-carried was a scrawny thing, deathly pale from blood loss with a messy head of curly brown hair. The other, a robust-looking Mon-keigh in the dirty remnants of a military uniform, glared up at the balcony with a scowl that looked very much at place between his heavy brow and broad shoulders.

"It's looking at me," Moradys muttered. For the first time in recent memory, something outside of her own inward fantasies caused her heartbeat to quicken.

She glanced around at her guards, who shifted from foot to foot uneasily, halberds swaying in their grips. No one seemed to quite know what to do. The fact that Moradys numbered among them only made her angrier.

"It's  _ looking  _ at  _ me!"  _ she said again, grabbing hold of the railing and glaring down at the foul little thing.

Except it wasn't. In fact, it didn't seem to take notice of her at all. It was looking at the balcony, yes, but as Moradys traced the line of its vision, she found herself working right back up the same path she had followed down. As soon as Moradys' gaze fell on Ruhara, the latter woman pushed away from the railing and strode past Moradys towards the balcony's exit.

"Excuse me, mistress. I will show the slavers the consequences of allowing their cattle to become unruly."

With Ruhara no longer in sight of the slave lines, the Mon-keigh searched the balcony for a few moments before turning his attention to the thing he carried alongside him. The legs of the smaller slave began to give out, and by the time the two disappeared from sight beneath the balcony, was being dragged rather than walking of its own accord. Would the bigger one continue to carry it even after it died? What about when it began to rot?

For the first time in nearly a minute, Moradys looked up to those Drukhari standing atop the alcoves platforms on either side of the hall. Many were looking her way, or very clearly had been before feigning disinterest. It should only have taken another instant for her mind to turn towards matters of politics and social maneuvering, but those old games had somehow become even more unappealing in the short time she'd set them aside. She looked back down at the slaves to search for something else of interest, but found only downcast heads and shuffling feet. There was no color to these things. There only quality was quantity, and there only purpose to serve as fuel for the unending holocaust that sustained the city. Such broken things could never be objects of amusement, for what pleasure could there be in breaking what was already broken?

Moradys’ foot had begun tapping the ground of its own accord, and she stopped it before again looking out to the assembled Drukhari. As she scanned the supplicants and representatives, an absurdly humorous thought crossed her mind - a fresh one, seeming to come from nowhere and carrying a flavor far different from the tired old ones that had repeated themselves so many times over the millenia. It was rare that she did anything, no matter how small, without careful consideration of all its impossible consequences. And for her to do something -  _ especially  _ the small things - without full and conscious intention? That was utterly incomprehensible.

She let her hands slip from the railing, turned, and walked to the far side of the balcony. For a few rapturous moments, her muscles seemed to no longer be under her control - as if a spirit of the Warp had taken hold of each and used its brief mastery over her to do something as mundane as take a few dozen steps. The illusion vanished as she reached the other side of the balcony and wrapped her fingers around the railing. The confused murmurs of her fellow Drukhari had reached such a fever pitch that she could hear the ghostly whispers over the howl of the slaves below. She ignored the former and peered down into the teeming masses of Mon-keigh below, watching their turned backs and waiting for something interesting to appear.

* * *

Love at first sight was a myth, or a fairy tale, or a self-told lie made up by those who had never experienced true, lasting love. It had taken to Theron’s third date with his to-be wife for him to know that he loved her - and it was less a deciding than a realizing, as if that love had been waiting in the background all along for the right moment to present itself. That moment had been at the city gardens near his home, beneath the warm mid-day sun, as he watched her spin a lily petal atop a pool with gentle strokes of her finger.

It was not a feeling he’d ever expected to relive, nor was it one he  _ wanted  _ to relive. Yet there he walked, staring up at the alien who had taken everything from, realizing that he hated this woman more than anything else in his narrow existence - and it had only taken to their second meeting. The woman’s narrow, angled eyes connected with his, and the orange of her irises seemed to flare in surprise. She leaned back from the railing, meeting his resolute gaze with one that flickered continuously over to her scantily-clad companion. The smaller woman beside her was talking to her superior, apparently unaware of the other’s mental preoccupation. She wore thigh-high leather boots, hip-covering side skirts, and a black bustier that barely contained the breasts threatening to spill out from atop it. Given the angle he found himself at beneath the platform, her thong and lack of other clothing left little to the imagination. Theron’s eyes returned to the woman presiding triumphantly over this evil, only to catch a glimpse of her armored back as she strode away from the overlook.

It was, by any estimation, the smallest and loneliest victory imaginable - yet he felt a slight tinge of pride crease his lips as he imagined himself having cowed this alien dictator. She had taken his home, his hand, and his wife, and surely imagined him as broken as any of these other poor souls. What a blow it must be to the ego of a tyrant to find that there would always remain those who could never be broken.

Max lurched against Theron, only then reminding him that he was still helping the young man along. Theron looked down to offer some hollow encouragement or vain hope, but found the boy’s eyes closed and head rolled loosely to the side.

“Hey!” snapped Theron, putting his other arm under Max’s armpit and switching to an awkward side-shuffle in order to keep dragging him along. “Wake up! You need to  _ keep moving!” _

His eyelids fluttered open, but that was all Theron’s urgent warnings got him. Max’s feet continued to drag loosely along the ground, and his forehead dropped against Theron’s chest as the two men passed under the balcony their captor had watched them from. The temptation of exhausted collapse was a powerful one indeed, but Theron had managed to resist - luckily so for Max, whose unconsciousness would soon draw the attention of one of the disc-mounted aliens watching over the slaves.

“Max! Walk, damnit!  _ Walk!” _

It only took a few steps more for the difference in speed between himself and the man in front of him to become a problem. The chain connecting the ankles of the two men went taut, and Theron was yanked to the ground, just barely managing to wrap his arms around Max’s back as the two men fell. An uproar arose from the entire length of prisoners, with each crying out in sequence as they fell or stumbled as a result of the man behind him being dragged to a halt. The cries carried on far into the distance, until they were swallowed up by the sheer enormity of the hall. A furious shout followed from somewhere nearby, which immediately silenced all within earshot. Next came the familiar rhythmic pulsing of those airborne discs that zipped overhead, moving closer and closer until he could feel the thrumming in the depths of his skull.

An alien hopped down from the discs, landing a short distance up the line that Max's collapse had brought to a halt. Unlike those invaders who had assaulted his home, this woman's scant armor seemed more for show than protection. Her breastplate ended just below its namesake, and her head was bare aside from a snow-white mohawk that trailed down her back. The whip she carried in her right hand, which Theron assumed to be equally impractical, proved its usefulness when she delivered two quick lashes to the chain length in front of Theron and behind Max, separating the two from their group.

"Bhionn riantha!" she shouted as she strode towards the fallen pair. 

Whether they understood the words or not, the remaining slaves rushed to form a coherent grouping and resume a hurried march onwards. That seemed to be the correct move, as the alien paid them no more mind, her gaze focused strictly on those who had brought them to a stop in the first place. The woman coiled her whip back up and placed it on her belt as she walked, then stopped down to draw a knife from a sheath on her boot.

In the few moments that separated himself and the alien, a great many half-thoughts passed through his mind. He thought of his own life weighed against Max's, and felt anger at being dragged down by another's weakness. Shame, at having felt such a thing. And pride, for pushing aside selfish thoughts when they were at their most tempting. Finally, he thought of his wife - as he would be sure to do as long as he remained in this place, for he could never be sure which moment would be his last.

The alien stooped over the two men and grabbed Max by his hair, then drew his head back to expose his slender neck. His eyelids lifted to reveal a glassy, half-conscious gaze. If he was aware of the woman straddling his back, or the knife descending towards his neck, he gave no indication of the fact. Only when the pointed tip of her curved blade pressed against the side of his throat did a look of horrible realization cross his face. Theron would never forget that look - the pleading stare of a scared boy who wanted nothing more than to simply go home. Of all the horrors he would endure, that was the one that would never lose its fidelity in his nightmares - perhaps because of its humanity, or its simplicity, or perhaps because it was his earliest introduction to what horrors could come when all hope was lost.

It was a memory he would not trade for the world, because with it came the impetus for an act of bravery that would give him much-needed solace in the endless night of horrors to follow. Theron grabbed Max tight, then rolled him away from the blade so that Theron was now on top. They struck the right leg of the alien standing over the pair, sending her tumbling off to the side - but not before she managed to plant her knife in the meat of his back and drag it through his flesh. Pain like no other shot from shoulders to back, drawing forth an anguished scream that he could hardly believe had come from his own lungs. Nothing he'd ever felt before had hurt like that - not being stabbed in the chest, nor skull-bashed into unconsciousness. Merciful shock followed, turning his pain to a mute numbness that sapped all strength from his body.

Something heavy fell to the ground beside Theron, and metal struck metal. Dazily, he turned his eyes from Max's dull, open-mouthed stare to the space beside them, where their attacker lay on the ground in a crumpled heap. Her black-clad limbs twitched and thumped against the grating like those of an insect that hadn't yet accepted death, and a white foam dripped from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes, which were pointed at Theron, had gone entirely black, with only a thin sliver of yellow iris remaining beneath her dilated pupils and black sclera.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	5. As If In A Mirror

One moment, Moradys stood on the edge of the balcony, watching the bowed backs of the Mon-Keigh as dozens of chain-linked rows moved towards the great slave dhows awaiting them at the interior docks. The next, she lay on the ground, her senses shattered by a crack of thunder that cleaved right through the dusty old scaffolding of thought that had been built there over the years. Gone were the lofty concerns of politics, war, and Dominion. All those things she had taken to be herself was wiped away in an instant, and the space left behind by their vanishing made room for the world as it was to flood back in. The wailing of the Mon-keigh far below was a horrific tragedy so overpowering that it made tears flow from her eyes without end. The shadows of the cavernous hall's rafters were each one of them a cavernous portal to oblivion, and the ruby lights that pierced them a beacon of hope and promise. She couldn't imagine a more wondrous sight. Everything was with purpose and meaning, regardless of its beauty or horror - and for a time, she forgot that she was doomed.

The sound of metal scraping against metal drew Moradys' attention to her right, where one of her collapsed guards was slipping from the balcony, dragged down by the weight of the armored leg that hung limply over the edge. The remaining five were just as incapacitated, with some motionless while others seized in rhythmless spasms that contorted their limbs and forced air from their lungs in dry, bone-rattling screams.

"What  _ was _ that?" gasped Moradys. 

She could scarcely believe that the soft, wavering voice that came forth was her own. With a trembling hand she wiped the tears from her eyes and snot from her nose, and as she stood up a trickle of blood flowed from her nostril. The sight made her so dizzy that she fell back to one knee before holding a palm to her nose to stop the bleeding. It had been centuries since she'd last been made to bleed outside of a time and place of her choosing. The bleeding stopped, and she stood up as her guard finally slipped over the edge and fell to the ground below. The impact drew a series of new screams from the Mon-keigh, but the intellect that had been ripped from Moradys for those few moments was already beginning to return, and the sounds were no longer so terrible. She stumbled over to the edge of the railing, and found that the falling guard had crushed two captives beneath her armored bulk. The slave lines had stopped moving entirely, and they looked around in confusion at the dozens of Drukhari who had been reduced to twitching wrecks by the psychic emanation that had struck them all. The house representatives watching over the Triumph had fared better than most, which she initially contributed to virtue of their greater age and numbness of the soul. Then, she noticed that many of their guards had simply been reduced to crawling about on all fours, rather than rendered completely incapacitated. That would put the source of the emanation somewhere between Moradys' balcony and the slave dhows.

She pushed away from the railing and took off running towards the corridor that led away from the Triumphal balcony. A slight unease remained in the pit of her stomach, but the scared little girl of a few moments prior now seemed a distant dream, and the realities of the present moment once again became a priority. This Triumph would become her doom if the slaves became so emboldened by their guards' condition that they started a revolt. What an embarrassment that would be - Commoragh's first slave revolt in even  _ her  _ long memory, and other houses forced to contribute troops to put it down. Then, there was the matter of what - or  _ who  _ \- had turned her guards into gibbering spastics.

Somehow, even in her inept fumbling, Ruhara had brought her something of value.

* * *

A heavy crash drew Theron's attention away from his spasming attacker, towards a line of slaves to his right, where a heavily-armored alien lay atop the broken bodies of two human women. There was screaming, and crying, and a great deal of shouting, all of it human. He caught glimpses of hovering, plate-sized discs drifting slowly through the air, but their pilots were nowhere to be seen. The slave lines that had not already been frozen by one incident or another ground to a halt, but no guttural alien shrieking followed. His fellow captives looked around for some indication of what to do, but no one seemed to have anything to offer aside from the same uncertain looks and bowed heads. Somehow, they seemed  _ more  _ terrified now that their tormentors had gone silent.

Pain, not fear, had paralyzed Theron. The prospect of these aliens recovering from their convulsions was the only thing that gave him the strength to stagger to his feet and begin limping towards the edge of the hallway. He would have forgotten about Max entirely, had he not been reminded a single step in that the two men were chained together at their feet. Hauling him along by his armpits proved impossible to do one-handed, but he was able to muscle him over one shoulder well enough. Max's hip bone dug into the meat of Theron's shoulder with each step he took, and as he walked through the lines of chained prisoners he thanked the gods that the boy was even smaller than he'd thought beneath his ill-fitting clothes. Max groaned in time with Theron's lurching steps, and fresh blood soaked the hand that Theron gripped his thigh with.

"It's going to be fine," Theron panted. "All of it… everything's going to be fine."

Although the boy was light, it was a struggle to speak while carrying him. The throbbing of his poorly-treated stump of a wrist and the general poor state of his health only made matters worse. Even in as sorry a state as the two men were, the sight of a pair of captives attempting to flee their fate emboldened the rest of the prisoners. They pulled against their chains in a futile attempt to separate themselves from the others, and some shouted at Theron for help as he passed. He shouted back hollow apologies and continued on until he reached a gap between two lines, which he slipped through to begin making his way to the edge of the hall in hopes of finding a path of flight more concealed than their present one. A fallen guard further down the lines was already beginning to awaken, though her attention - and pistol - were focused on the prisoners who had begun to work each other into a frenzy.

Theron made his way to the nearest of the two walls, under whose shadows he was hidden from the chaos of the slaves lines, where order was beginning to be restored by the first few awakening guards. Flashes of green light within the crowd preceded human screams, the crack of alien whips turned those screams to moaning sobs, and the return of terror brought with it the relative quietude of a few minutes prior. By the time Theron found a smaller adjoining hallway to flee into, the lines of prisoners had resumed their ceaseless, chain-rattling march towards whatever greater misery awaited them. 

The corridor he had entered was only wide enough for five or six people to walk beside each other at once, and felt downright claustrophobic after being faced with the immensity of what now lay behind him. Strips of violet lighting ran down the length of both walls, giving off just enough light to avoid walking into a wall, but not so much that his feet didn't catch on each and every bit of crooked floor panelling. After rounding a corner, he collapsed with such rapidity that he didn't have time to gently set Max down, and simply let the boy drop from his shoulder onto his back. His legs, seeming to recognize that they had brought him safely away from imminent danger, refused to go any further, so he slumped against the wall and stared blankly forward while the adrenaline faded from his system. The stabbing pain in his back flared back to life, lungs which had labored to their utmost now burned, and twitches wracked his dehydrated limbs. There would be no more running for either of them.

"I can't do this," came a weak voice beside Theron.

He tilted his head to look down at Max, who lay sprawled out in an absurd fashion, limbs frozen where they had landed and torso twisted at an awkward angle. Despite the moments they had rested before, no blood stained the floor beneath Max's leg, and although Theron couldn't muster the energy to perform a real inspection of the wound, what blood was on the boy's pants appeared matte and dry.

"Wherever I go, I'm taking you with me," said Theron. "And  _ I'm _ getting out of here - you can count on that."

It wasn't a statement of bravery, but more a matter-of-fact observation of the chains connecting them by the ankles. Despite the simplicity of the statement, hindsight would lead Theron to conclude those to be the most important words he'd ever uttered.

"How can you know that?" Max said. His head rolled lazily against the floor, and he could hardly seem to keep his eyes open. The tone of his question was the sort one might get from a sleep-talker, but it was enough to encourage Theron. He leaned forward, gaining the dreamlike attention of Max's half-lidded gaze.

"Where would I be if I gave up when things seemed hopeless? Or when others told me I should? Living a dead-end life, that's where." He drove his handless wrist into his palm for emphasis. "I tell you, death is easy. It's life that's all struggle. I won't start doing the easy thing now, just because I feel a little tired."

Max lay silent for a moment, then gave a slow nod. That was good, but it was a far cry from getting up and walking. That's what he would need need to do if they were going to keep moving.

"You're lucky to be chained to me instead of someone else. I have too many things left to do to be stuck here. Don't you have someone you want to see again? Your family? A girlfriend?"

Max closed his eyes and rolled his head from side to side.

"What about something you want to do? Everyone has dreams."

He began to shake his head again, then stopped and opened his lips. Theron leaned forward expectantly.

"I want to make music," said Max.

Theron lurched to the side and used the wall to begin pulling himself to his feet.

"Yes!" he shouted hoarsely, drawing a startled twitch from Max. Memory of what lay behind them returned to him, and he fearfully lowered his voice. "That's a terrific dream. I'm a man of the arts myself, you know. It's not an easy road."

He stooped down to help Max sit up, and found that some color and warmth had returned to the young man.

"The first few steps are the hardest part. At least, that's what I've found."

Neither man should rightfully have been able to stand on his own, let alone keep the other from falling, but somehow in their weakness they managed to rise to their feet together.

"That wasn't so bad," said Theron. "Now it's just one foot in front of the other."

Faced with the prospect of walking on his wounded leg, Max's pallid expression contorted into one of utter terror. At least, that was what Theron assumed until he followed her gaze and found the alien woman standing a few short paces behind him. He recalled seeing her on the bridge that Max had collapsed under, standing beside the armored tyrant who presided over the madness. She was undoubtedly captivating - in a distinctly inhuman way - but some violence had marred her otherworldly beauty. Her stark white visage was a gory mess, with streaks of blood running from her nostrils and eyes to paint her ample breasts. 

Despite looking far worse off than either himself or Max, the woman didn't seem to be in any great distress. She simply stood there, expression blank, staring at the two men. A great many possible actions flashed through Theron's mind, many violent and the remainder centered around running with what speed he and Max could muster. But as a sliver of reason returned to his panicked mind, he again considered the bloodied state of this alien - the obscene dress, her violent superior - and he considered that he might be looking at a fellow captive.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The undercroft of the Masquerade's sanctum had once comprised a single dungeon, in which was housed the collection of Mon-keigh kept close at hand for purposes of unholy rites. Over the course of recent years, however, it had pushed deep into Commoragh's bedrock to make room for the expansive network of pleasure chambers and laboratories constructed by the Kabal's leader. It was within those abbatoirs of dark science that Khannah searched for her mistress, whose forays outside of the sanctum had become fewer and further between as she came to prefer the solitude of her study to the hollow pomp of another Triumph. Khannah might have agreed, were the nature of her mistress's research not so… disquieting.

As with much of the complex, the hall Khannah passed through was as much a place of contemplation as it was a laboratory. Display cases lined the left side, filled with creatures that had been stripped of much of their matter to display some vital system. One hulking Ork brute had been stripped of its green skin to reveal the rippling musculature beneath. It was an impressive specimen, twice her own height and many times her weight. One would not covet an Ork's intelligence, or culture, or history, but she could at least admire its creator-given ability to tear limb from limb.

Two dozen more steps brought Khannah to the sprawling nervous system of a Mon-keigh, which had been posed as if it were still contained within its fleshy shell. Here, there seemed little to appreciate beyond the ability to feel with more terrible magnitude than could ever be desired. Of what use were the senses when they were subjected to such a wide-reaching onslaught of feeling? Especially when that feeling needed to be processed by a brain as feeble as a Mon-keigh's.

The hall brought her to a chamber, and irreverent art gave way to profane science. Adrubal had become obsessed with improvement of her own body, but for some reason had spurned the coveted services of the Shapers in favor of her own efforts. Cost couldn't have been the issue. The Shapers charged an arm and a leg - sometimes a liver - but that was little compared to what it had cost their Kabal to fund their mistress's experiments. Secrecy was undoubtedly one of Adrubal's foremost concerns. Khannah was one of the few allowed in these halls, and even she was privvy to little of what Adrubal actually did with the results of her science. It did beg the question of _ what  _ she wanted to keep secret. In a city where taboos themselves were taboo, what could a woman of her stature need to hide from all prying eyes and ears?

As she passed faintly-glowing preservation tubes and bubbling organ vats, a punctuated, airy noise spread outward to fill the silence. The sound revealed itself to be the ragged breaths of a living thing, and the turn of a corner brought Khannah to its owner. A circular space had been cleared in the center of the laboratory, with machinery and arrays of surgical tools pushed off to the side. Lights circled the perimeter, bathing in a silvery light the male Mon-keigh suspended seven feet above the ground. He had been torn apart, his every limb and organ hung on hooks for independent examination. Two hairy legs separated by at least a dozen feet twitched in sequence with each other, like a wounded insect desperate for escape. His intestines were hung vertically so that gravity could do the work that his eviscerated abdominal muscles could not. A tank of preservative fluid sat on the ground in the center of the display, holding a heart that beat with such speed and force that it thumped against the sides of the container. Artificial tubing had been spliced into the circulatory system, allowing the thing's body parts to be spread out further than they otherwise would have been. At the edge of the circle, where the lighting was brightest, were two lonely beings. One, the severed head of a Mon-keigh. The other, a pale figure clad in black armor. Her colorless skin shone with a silvery glow from the light of the operating theater, and each strand of long white hair shimmered with the slight movements of her head.

Khannah approached her mistress. Adrubal stood facing the Mon-keigh, whose spinal cord had been left attached to its head. Its scalp was peeled back, and the skull sawed through to reveal the pink folds inside. Adrubal held long, thin needles in each hand, which she slid into the thing's brain. The Mon-keigh's sleepy eyes snapped open, and it bared its teeth in a wet snarl. The heart in the container beat faster, and the lungs suspended nearby wheezed with exhertion.

Adrubal studied the face, betraying no emotion nor giving any hint of recognition to the woman standing beside her. Khannah waited patiently, arms clasped in front of her, taking the opportunity to examine the mistress she had seen so little of over the past solar decades. Adrubal's skin was so white and unblemished that it was as if someone had brought a statue of polished marble to life. Her irises were red, and the sclera of her narrow eyes white like those of a Mon-keigh, instead of black. It was one of the first changes she had made to herself, and one which Khannah still found disconcerting after so many years spent peering into those very eyes. Similarly-colored stripes of jagged red flesh ran out of the neckline of her armor to just above her jawline. A more recent modification, and one which Khannah didn't know the source of. It was one thing to better oneself, but for Adrubal to sully herself with the genetics of cattle?

It reeked of perversion.

"I wonder if it understands what's been done to it," said Khannah, casting a wide gaze over the travesty of flesh hung across the open space.

The instruments clasped between Adrubal's finger twitched, but she said nothing. With her eyes fixed intently on those of the Mon-keigh before her, she furrowed her brow and drew down the corners of her lips until her expression was a perfect replica of the utter rage playing across that of her counterpart. Only her eyes failed to carry the same short-lived fury - instead, they betrayed a long-simmering frustration.

"You could place a mirror before it," suggested Khannah. "That way it could see."

Adrubal slid the metal pins from the thing's brain. Not all the way, but far enough that the Mon-keigh's expression drooped back into a numb stupor. The false anger on Adrubal's face likewise faded, leaving only the clenched jaw and narrowed eyes of a woman whose patience had never been extensive.

"I torment  _ worlds,  _ not  _ cattle." _

Her mistress's voice was barely above a whisper, though the deepness of it echoed throughout the room's many alcoves and domed ceiling. Laconic speech and a hushed tone had accompanied Adrubal's reclusiveness, and would have Khannah fearing her mistress had succumb to the ennui that afflicted all Drukhari who lived long enough to reach the end of life's many pleasures and pains. Only the focused anger in her blood-red eyes caused Khannah to set her fears aside. Drukhari did not fight their long, inevitable slip into the grip of She Who Thirsts. They simply… fell.

"Of course, Mistress. You would not waste cruelties as ingenious as yours on one Mon-keigh. You would waste it on the millions passing through the Triumph."

Khannah watched as Adrubal manipulated the thing's brain to paint a broad grin across its face. Blood wept from the corners of its cracked lips, and its bloodshot eyes displayed none of the mirth that the lower half would suggest. In that, it and Adrubal were alike. The Kabal leader pointed her smiling visage at Khannah and placed her hand on her armored chest as if to affect a laugh, but quickly dropped the act and returned the Mon-keigh to its natural state.

"Are you here to complain about going in my place?" said Adrubal.

"I would prefer to have attended together."

Khannah took a step closer and placed her hand on the back of Adrubal's neck - the one exposed bit of flesh besides her head - and gave it an affectionate squeeze. Her Mistress drew her shoulders up and bristled with such obvious distaste that Khannah withdrew her hand before it was shrugged off.

"And just who  _ did  _ you attend with?" snapped Adrubal. Her hands trembled in anger, shaking the needles in her subject's brain and causing its disparate limbs to rattle the chains holding them aloft. "Were you forced to enjoy someone else's fingers while you watched?"

Khannah frowned. "I  _ didn't  _ attend. It is being held right now."

Adrubal grunted a begrudging acknowledgement, but the stoic frown she held told Khannah there would be no apology. Not that were ever any to be had, least of all in those days. Jealousy was a bitter draught Khannah herself had enjoyed for the first years of her Mistress's hermitude, but stalking and torture of possible suitors had turned up no evidence of playmates being favored over Khannah. That was the proper way to conduct a relationship - not this blunt, childish brooding and bottled emotion.

It was one of many things she hated about what Adrubal had become. The anger, the isolation, the unknown secrets that went unshared between two who had once been so close. Even Adrubal's body had been kept hidden from Khannah, encased in armor for so long that it had regressed from warm familiarity to cold mystery.

"Give Moradys my sincerest apologies for missing her ridiculous parade," said Adrubal. "And tell her that I'll gut that simpleton giant of hers if she tries to make us work together again."

The utter disregard for position and tradition was the second. What would happen if Adrubal deigned to venture from her hiding place and engage in the politics she had left to Khannah? Disaster for the Kabal and it's many servants, surely.

"I will convey those general sentiments to  _ Lady  _ Moradys," said Khannah.

Adrubal took the long, thin needles clasped between her fingertips and withdrew them from the Mon-keigh's brain, then set them on a tray beside her. The creature almost seemed to let out a sigh of relief - but that was surely it's over-excited nervous system finally being allowed to rest.

"I will tell her you are occupied with…"

Khannah trailed off, once again examining the operating theater, as if a third look would give her some insight into her mistress's purpose, however dimly. Yet all she found was an inability to grasp the purpose of all that sundered flesh, and a deep disquiet in her heart at her inability to see the root of the madness growing in her mistress's mind.

With pursed lips and a heavy gaze, Adrubal followed the same path Khannah's eyes had taken, seeming to come to the same realization of purposelessness that her servant had. Whatever she had sought to draw from this torture, she had not found.

"Seeing what makes a man, a man," said Adrubal.


	6. Three's A Crowd

Theron met the alien's blackened gaze for a long, silent moment, trying in vain to divine her unknowable intentions before she acted on them. Her eyes darted all over his body with unnerving rapidity, returning to his face only after having taken in the entirety of his and Max's ragged forms. She extended a single foot in preparation to take a step towards him, moving with an exaggerated slowness that went some way to assuring him of her peaceable intentions. 

When she next put weight on her forward foot, a bizarre contortion worked its way up her body from feet to face, and she collapsed forward. Theron buckled at the knees and caught her against his shoulder, wrapping his bad arm around her back to keep her from slipping to the ground. She was surprisingly heavy despite her slender frame, and the fact that she was a bit taller put her head just above his own. Two glassy eyes quickly regained their focus, and she swiveled them down to Theron as her lips drew into an open-mouthed frown of blatant disgust.

"Ta si'eam dairsin!"

The alien leapt back, wrenching free of his grip in the process. The strength she showed when she did so made it apparent that he was very lucky she hadn't instead shoved _ him _ away instead. She held her arms away from her body and cast a long, horrified look over her nearly-naked form, as if the briefest of contact with him had infected her with all manner of horrible afflictions.

And perhaps that was a more genuine concern than it would have seemed. These were, after all, alien beings with alien biologies and attitudes that he knew nothing about, beyond their otherworldly appearance and capacity for violence.

Her shock hardened into a glare of disgust-laden fury, and she lunged at Theron before stopping just short of him. He took a step back and began to draw his arm out from under Max, preparing to drop the boy in the even of a fight. If this degrade into a brawl, he wasn’t the least bit sure he could win. He was exhausted, one-handed, and weaker than the alien despite her frail frame.

Shoulders hunched and pale fingers flexing greedily, the alien’s pitch-black eyes swiveled from Theron to Max, and she angled towards the latter as if trying to sniff something out while being unwilling to put herself within arm’s reach of either man. Her attention returned to Theron, and she took two quick steps towards him before grabbing hold of his shirt collar and hauling him towards her. The movement took Theron by surprise, and he was unable to stop Max from collapsing to the ground. As he stumbled towards the alien, she released his collar and grabbed a fistful of messy hair, wrenching his head sideways while she glared down at him. Thin, white lips moved beneath narrowed eyes, producing the choking gutturals of her xeno language. It was the first time he had heard one of them speak so quietly or calmly, yet it put an aching chill in his chest worse than the most horrid of threats bellowed by the slave drivers.

The alien dragged his head downward as she spoke, forcing him to lower his body with it lest she rip a handful of hair from his scalp. In a flash of frustrated anger, with little thought paid to the possible consequences of rash action, Theron mustered his remaining strength and swung his balled up right fist at her face, catching her square in the nose. Her eyes went wide, her jaw dropped, and she released his hair before taking a step backwards. A slender, trembling hand went to the left side of her chest, and she held it there while staring off into the distance in vacant, stunned silence.

“That’s enough of that!” Theron leveled his own shaky arm at her and did his best to steady a voice that threatened to turn panicked from fear of what may happen next. “I won’t touch you, and you won’t touch me.”

He stooped down to scoop Max up, raising the delirious young man back into a standing position. The alien turned this way and that in the dim light, gawping at some miraculous sight only she could perceive. 

“I’d never hit a woman,” he whispered to Max while keeping his focus on the alien. “But this is a xeno, and that changes things. Desperate times, after all.”

Max mumbled a wordless acknowledgement and nodded without opening his eyes. Still conscious, at least.

The wallop he’d given the alien had only been intended as a visceral warning, much like one would give a firm punch on the snout to any overly-confident Gozem hounds back home. Instead, it seemed to have rattled her brain completely. Still, it didn’t look as if the outside had suffered any damage. Her nose remained flawlessly straight, and the blood crusting her upper lip was the dried, dark-red sort that had been there when they’d first encountered each other.

A flicker of higher intellect returned to the alien’s vacant eyes, and she moved her hand about her chest in search of something before giving her nose a cursory inspection. Finally, her attention returned to Theron, and her expression hardened. This time, however, her anger was lessened - momentarily subdued by whatever unsurety his retaliation had given her. It was a detente that would not last much longer.

“I mean to escape, and I think we can help each other.” 

With no idea of whether she was understanding a word he said, Theron gestured between the three of them and then thrust his wrist stump towards the far end of the hallway, where it split into two. He _ did _know that there were few ways he or Max could help the alien escape her cruel masters - if she even desired such a thing - but they certainly needed her. With no idea of where they were or what sort of layout this complex had, a guide would be essential.

The alien tilted her chin up ever so slightly, staring at him with a look of utter bafflement.

“You…” The word came from her throat as a long, croaking echo, as if long-atrophied vocal chords were being forced back into use to produce the sounds of human language. She put her hand on her throat, swallowed, then pointed at her chest.

“_ I… _ help… _ you?” _

It was Theron’s turn for his jaw to drop. What a miracle of miracles - to happen upon the one alien in this place who suffered as much as the humans did, was remotely amenable to reasonable discussion, _ and _spoke Gothic.

“Yes!” He lurched towards her, Max in tow and voice full of enthusiasm. “Do you know where we are? How we can get somewhere safe?”

She examined him for a moment more before making a half-turn, gesturing down the hallway, and starting in that direction. After a few steps she stopped and looked back, waiting for Theron and Max to begin hobbling after her before she resumed walking. Each of her long, graceful strides took her several times the distance the two men’s awkward steps did, and it wasn’t long before her impatience began to show. She stopped, glared back at Theron, and snapped the fingers of one hand in rapid succession until he caught up. Then, she strode off into the distance, stopped, and the cycle repeated itself all over again.

“Why you carry a dead thing?”

The question sent Theron staggering forward as his feet caught on the uneven stone floor, and he risked a glance downward to check that Max was indeed still moving his legs of his own volition. Either the alien’s grasp of Gothic was as imperfect as her grating accent would indicate, or she was prone to obscene hyperbolism.

“He isn’t _ dead,” _said Theron.

She gave him a mixed look of simultaneous anger, frustration, and tired amusement.

“What is the thing to you?” she said. “Family?”

Beside him, Max’s closed eyes flickered and his lips moved wordlessly. There was a peaceful look about him in that moment, as if whatever dreams he now enjoyed had taken his mind far away from the subterranean labyrinth they now navigated. He couldn’t rightly call Max a friend, having known the boy no longer than a few days, but acquaintances was far too sterile a label to slap on whatever bond they’d formed.

“Brothers in arms,” said Theron.

“Brothers,” the alien echoed softly, as if filing that bit of information away for some unknowable purpose.

Several minutes later, the trio reached the fork in the hallway. It had seemed so near when they first started off - and indeed, could have been no further away than 500 feet - but the labor of dragging Max along with the weight of his own dehydrated muscles had turned the short trip into a gargantuan task that forced Theron to rest the two of them against a wall as the alien continued down the right branch of the hallway.

She made it a short distance before noticing the lack of footsteps echoing her own. Spinning about, her eyes fell on Theron, then Max, and she stormed over to the pair.

"Enough!" she shouted.

Seeing that her anger was directed at the man she had so affectionately labelled dead weight, Theron put himself between the alien and Max.

"Put it down!" she snapped as she forcibly untangled his arm from Max's back.

Theron tried to brush her away with his mangled arm, which had the unexpected - but welcome - effect of eliciting such blatant revulsion in the alien that she momentarily withdrew from the pair. She returned seconds later with renewed anger, ripping Theron's hand from Max's baggy shirt and dragging him away from the fallen young man by his collar. The military-grade fabric refused to tear no matter how much Theron twisted and pulled against her unbreakable grip, and he resorted to attempting a repeat of his earlier blow to the face, which had been so remarkably successful.

This time, however, the alien was ready. She caught his left arm by the wrist, and held him in that position as her eyes burned yellow and her grip tightened to such a degree that his hand went numb and the tendons of his forearm screamed in pain. Just as he feared ending up with a second useless limb, release came. The encircling his wrist loosened enough for him to regain movement, the hand on his collar slackened, and the alien's eyes widened as her gaze drifted up above Theron's head.

A broad hand, cold and metallic, fell on the back of his neck, and his head was dashed against the wall.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The larger of the two Mon-keigh crumpled to a heap against the wall. Ruhara walked over to the smaller one, rolled it onto its back with her boot, then placed her heel on its frail neck. Throughout all of this, she gave no indication that she took notice of the ghastly look Moradys levelled at her.

"_ Why _would you do that?" said Moradys.

Ruhara's face snapped to her Mistress, and she wiped away the still-wet blood staining her chin. The bleeding from her ears and nose looked to only recently have stopped, though her eyes still wept thin rivulets of blood. She must have been close to the psychic event.

Ruhara's eyes flashed to the Mon-keigh she'd battered into unconsciousness. "It touched you, mistress!"

Another look at the fallen creature, and the blood smeared on the wall, left Moradys fearing that her Novarch had done more than simply stun the thing. Moradys knelt down beside it and watched for the ride and fall of its chest, unwilling to get close enough to listen for its breathing - let alone to feel for signs of a heartbeat.

To her left, a choking cough was cut short as Ruhara leaned her weight on the other Mon-keigh's neck. It's eyes still closed, it clawed at Ruhara's boot in a futile attempt to stop the inevitable. The resistance lasted only a moment, and the hand fell back to the cold stone as its face began to turn from white to purple. Moradys knelt there, watching with silent disinterest, until a recent memory sent her shooting to her feet.

"Wait!"

Ruhara shifted her weight off of the creature, and it drew in a desperate, sputtering breath.

"It may prove useful. They're brothers."

Despite the confused look she gave her mistress, Ruhara showed no hesitation in removing her foot from the thing's throat. Moradys turned to face her, but turned her gaze to the Mon-keigh who had not only _ looked _upon her, spoken to her, and touched her… but had struck her.

By all rights, she should inflict upon the thing unimaginable horrors of the body and mind. Such torments that it would wish for _ more _limbs to be take from it, if only to have less to feel its new, terrible reality with.

But she had done that already. Over, and over, and over - in such vast quantities and through so many years that to put a number to either would serve no purpose other than to impress upon the listener the enormity of her ennui. Destroying the soul of this psychically-gifted being would buy her own soul a small sliver of much-needed life, but she knew from experience how fleeting that rejuvenation would be. The sands of time flowed ever faster, and fighting their ceaseless march in the traditional manner felt more pointless with each passing day.

As Moradys gazed down at the tangled mess of ragged clothes, filthy flesh, and dirty hair, she placed a hand over her heart and found its beat as slow and steady as ever. Why not do something different, for once? Why not do something _ fun? _

Slowly, Moradys raised her arm to point at the Mon-keigh at her feet. "I have my arena's new centerpiece."

  
  
  
  
  



	7. A Cold Embrace

_ In the distant past… _

Malcador stood at the edge of the round tent, clutching the hood of his cloak against the cold. The winds were fierce on the roof of the world, and the fire crackling in the center of the tent did little to warm his bones. Eight women and nine men sat huddled around the fire on stools whittled from old stumps, holding their hands out to the fire. There was no similarity in their appearance. One man, whose pitch skin seemed to suck in all light, wore the colorful fetishes and shrunken heads of far-flung jungle tribes. He shuddered beneath the many furs he’d heaped over his back. Opposite him, a shirtless man with pale skin and hair like fire sat with his arms balanced on legs clad in colorful plaid leggings. Blue paint adorned his cheekbones, and his green eyes glittered with the yellow light of the fire before him. The differences in dress and demeanor were as varied as their origins. None had come from the same land, but all had made the impossible journey across mountain and ocean at the behest of the same man.

Malcador's master sat amongst the other eight, but even among those colorful figures proved the odd man out. Simple leathers adorned his stout, hairy frame, and he sat cross-legged on the floor, shunning the use of the seat behind him. Just as the progression of mankind’s bodily form had taken it further and further away from this prehistoric being, so had the accumulation of untold millennia of experience within those ancient, deep-set eyes.

The tent flap opened, letting in wind and snow, and all eyes turned to examine the newcomer standing in the threshold. She was an olive-skinned woman, with curly black hair and a beak-like nose. Fanciful purple fabrics peaked out beneath the thick furs she had donned against the elements, and gold jewelry buried within the many folds caught the light of the campfire like hundreds of glittering stars. A snow-covered vulture sat perched on her shoulder, its naked head swiveling this way and that to take in the room's occupants as its owner glared down at her seated host.

Malcador turned his gaze to his master, whose own eyes remained fixed firmly on the flame before him. In times past, this ancient being would have at least feigned the behaviors and emotions of the people he travelled amongst. But as his spirit grew in power, and his sight turned to the distant stars and the hungry things that lay beyond and between them, his vision rarely returned to the ground his body walked on. Once, long ago, he had been of this world. Now, he was anathema to it - and those who still dwelled within it.

The woman stepped inside, letting the tent flap close behind her while the vulture on her shoulder shook the snow dusting its drab feathers. It was an odd choice of pet for the woman, who had travelled from the colorful mercantile lands of far Canaan.

"When a summons is made, adequate lodgings are typically prepared in advance."

Although she spoke loud enough for all within the tent to hear, her lips did not move, nor did her words carry a hint of foreign accent. It was a projection of the mind, audible to all whose spirit had learned to listen to such things. Malcador gestured at the last of the empty seats, which lay opposite the fire from his Master. The Canaanite flashed the young servant a look of annoyance, but ultimately obeyed and took her seat. It would have been folly to make a fuss over such a thing after already having travelled for months to gather there.

A low, thoughtful rumble emanated from deep within the Master's broad chest, and he straightened his posture as his palms fell across his knees. Those who had been waiting in the tent the longest nearly leapt from their seats in surprise, startled by such an uncharacteristic degree of movement from a being who must have seemed a statue of flesh and blood. 

When he finally spoke, it was by the same means of the Canaanite, but the power of his words was beyond anything the others in the tent could muster. When one listened to his thoughts, there was always the impression that he was holding back the greater part of them. Not out of calculating secrecy, but as a mercy to those smaller minds that would struggle to contain the enormity of what he sought to convey.

And here, the warning he brought was far greater than any of the assembled could truly fathom - Malcador included. Malcador had trust in his Master, but the other seers did not share that trust. When they heard what he was asking of them, there were those would refuse to see the truth of his words

And for those, there were… contingencies.

  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  


There are few things more disconcerting than to wake up with no idea of where one was, how long one had been there, or how they had gotten there. Upon opening his eyes, the only anchors Theron had to reality was the throbbing pain in his skull, the burning inflammation of his infected wrist, and the putrid stench of human waste filling his nostrils. A metal ceiling hung some two dozen feet above him, and a cobblestone floor pressed into the torn flesh of his back. To his left was a wall of featureless grey stone, and to his right another wall of closely-set metal bars that ran from floor to ceiling. A door set into the bars was the room's only exit, which opened into a corridor running adjacent to the locked room. Several other darkened hallways branched off of it, leading to parts unknown. Everything was bathed in a sickly green light that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

He'd found himself in a prison of some sort, and he was not alone in his predicament. Ten other humans, all of them men, huddled in small groups at various spots within the vast space. Directly ahead of him, a small corridor bored through rock provided a passageway to another jail cell, in which more figures sat huddled in heaps of filthy rags.

Theron rolled into his left side and pushed himself up with his left hand. His vision swam from the effort, and something wet dropped from his wounded scalp onto his shoulder. Reaching up, he felt about the spot where he'd been slammed into the wall, and found his head had been bandaged. Between the bandage and the wound was packed a foul-smelling mush speckled with luminous green particles that glowed eerily in the dim light. As he looked about the room, he took notice of the fact that there was no obvious source of artificial light within the space - no lanterns or crystal-lined wall insets. The same green specks that had dripped onto his hand glowed faintly along the edges of the room, with some trails running up the walls into crevices where the stone had been eroded.

He began to unwrap his head bandage, but a sharp tutting to his rear made him stop and search for the source of the objection. A bald old man sat propped up against the wall to his rear, clad in a filthy robe whose tattered trim and drapes hinted at a former exquisiteness. His pale skin and faded eyes told the tale of a man who had not seen the sun in ages.

The old man leveled a rattling, bony finger at him. "Don't take that off until your head is healed. You'll regret it."

Theron pressed the bandage back into place and turned to face the man. "Where are we?"

The man slowly tilted his head back against the wall, and his glassy eyes drifted upward as the corners of his cracked lips drew down in a look of contemplative horror. The deep lines criss-crossing his face uniformly deepened, as if his expression had finally returned to its natural resting state.

"Where, thoust says? Where, where…"

His words trailed off into dry mutterings, and for a moment Theron thought he had lost the man to the cobwebs of his own senile mind.

"Tis a place outside of places," said the man. "A city, a world, an abattoir, a labyrinth… but most of all, a nightmare."

_ A world. _

Not a ship, or space station, or other xeno-made construct. The immensity of the arrival hall and the stone walls of his present prison should have been clue enough that they were planet-side, but his mind still refused to accept the notion - and not solely from fear of its implications. There was something ungrounded about all this, as if he were walking about a dream that constructed itself anew with each fresh moment… or, as the old man said, a nightmare.

"What's your name?" said Theron.

The man's face screwed up in confusion, then effortful recollection, as if the question were severely taxing the atrophied muscles of his intellect.

"Parthinias," he finally said. "Twas not long past I had other names, and grand titles to preface them… but now, it is just 'Parthinias'."

It hadn't taken long for the man's unplaceable accent and archaic speech to become apparent, and the addition of such an unheard of name only served to deepen the mystery. The questions of where the man hailed from and how long he'd been here rose to the forefront of Theron's mind, but were quickly replaced by the realization that he hadn't been captured alone.

"The ones who came with me-"

Scanning his surroundings, his eyes quickly fell on one of the nearby huddled figures he had originally taken for one of the many nameless prisoners. A second look revealed that what he'd thought was a ragged hood was a head of messy brown hair, and that the man resting his head against his folded knees was the one he'd made his escape attempt with.

"He is sleeping," said the old man.

So not dead from blood loss. It was good to know that, and also interesting to discover that the old man's faded eyes could still see.

"There was an alien with us," said Theron.

The old man frowned in apology. "I do not know anything about that. Thine pair arrived alone."

Then she was likely dead. Killed for trying to help two prisoners escape. Well,  _ one  _ prisoner, anyway. She hadn't seemed too tolerant of the so-called 'dead weight' he had been carrying alongside him. Questions were piling on top of questions, and Theron was determined to begin eliminating the simplest of them.

He scooted towards the old man and leaned in close. "Where are you from, Parthinias?"

At that, his expression - almost gentle in its senility - assumed a surprising hardness. "Where was I born?" the man exclaimed. "Or dost thou wonder where I lived? Where I served? Thoust poses simple questions with no simple answer!"

Rather than a complex question, it seemed to simply be one the old man would rather avoid altogether. Theron decided to let the matter drop, after the final confirmation of one persistent suspicion.

"You're not from Bulanel, are you?"

Parthinias shook his head. "I have never heard of it."

The prison cell, already the size of a large home, assumed a terrifying emptiness that seemed to scatter its inhabitants to an unreachable distance. When the invaders had come, the death and destruction they brought smothered any grand realizations of how humanity was, in fact, not alone in the universe. Even when marching through the slave lines, the aliens barking grotesque orders at him had seemed more fixtures of a feverish nightmare than evidence of any grand philosophical upheavals.

But here, now, faced with this human being who spoke his language, yet had never stepped foot on the same soil as himself - Theron recoiled at the awesome vastness of shared history it implied.

Still reeling, he stood up and walked over to Max in a daze. The young man looked up at him as he approached, his eyes bloodshot, face wet, and nose dripping. Perhaps he  _ had  _ been sleeping earlier, but he'd clearly spent the last half hour crying into his lap. Theron stood there for a moment, unsure of what to say.

He returned to Parthinias. "Do you have any water?"

The old man eyed him wearily for a moment, then reached behind his back and pulled out a tin cup he’d hidden there. It was half full, and smelled a bit suspect, but Theron was far too thirsty to worry about future digestive problems the putrid water might cause. He forced himself to stop drinking at the halfway point - a surprisingly difficult exercise of willpower - then took the rest over to Max. Parthinias let out a sputtering objection when he walked off with the cup, but settled back down to the ground amidst anxious mutterings when he saw that Theron was merely handing it to the other man.

“How’s your leg?” said Theron.

Max wiped the snot from his upper lip onto his sleeve, then took the cup.

"It feels fine." He took the cup, but merely held it in front of his face and stared into the brackish water.

"He would not let me see it," said Parthinias.

Max shot the old man a look of a look of annoyance. "I can walk on it, and it barely hurts. If it gets worse,  _ then  _ I'll have it looked at."

It was the first time he'd seen the young man display something akin to anger. Max forced down the rest of the water, and Theron returned Parthinias' prized cup to the old man. Despite the recency of his body-spanning injuries, none of them hurt to the point of incapacitation. That was reason enough to refrain from 

"Are there no women here?" said Theron. There was only one he had in mind.

Parthinias chuckled. "Tis exceedingly rare that a woman is selected for the arena."

"What arena?"

"That of the Wych cult," he continued. "Did thine world not have gladiatorial arenas?"

It certainly had at  _ one  _ point, but that sport had died out millenia ago alongside slavery. Here, both institutions were apparently alive and well.

“We’re in an arena,” Theron said confirmingly.

Parthinias nodded.

“I don’t know how to  _ fight!”  _ Theron gestured at Max. “And I doubt he does, either.”

The old man gave him a look of sad humor. “Thou art not expected to _ fight. _ Thou art expected to  _ die.” _

His thin smile vanished, and he dropped his gaze down to the ground, an expression of shame crinkling his aged face. Theron turned from him and went back over to the Max, who had dropped his forehead back onto his knees and wrapped his arms around his thighs in a seated fetal position.

“We’re finding a way out of here.” Theron grabbed Max’s arm and tried to haul him to his feet, but the latter resisted and yanked himself free without looking up from his lap. Dragging around a compliant man - albeit a half-dead one - was hard enough, and doing so with a resistant one would be impossible. There was little Theron wouldn’t risk to save another human being, but the knowledge that Vala was out there, somewhere, altered the calculus of his thinking so significantly that already he felt a deep frustration directed at the petulant child seated before him.

Theron stepped to Max’s side and hooked his arms around him, grasping his arm with the good one and holding tight to the young man’s chest and back. Just as he started to lift, Max flailed in his grip, growling in anger and shaking free with such force that Theron fell to the ground beside him.

“Stay, then!” He pushed himself to his feet and positioned himself in front of Max, who had managed to curl up into an even tighter ball of defiance. 

Someone who didn’t  _ want  _ help was someone who couldn’t  _ be  _ helped. Theron knew that. He also knew that his wife was here, somewhere, and that every second he lingered meant another second of terror for her. Why, then, couldn’t he move? Why couldn’t he take more than a few short steps away from someone he had only just met?

A sharp gasp and the scuff of sandals on stone drew his attention to Parthinias, who frantically clawed his way up the wall before shuffling past Theron towards the next of the prison rooms as fast as his legs would take him. As he watched the old man’s movements, he saw the reason for the unannounced departure. Three alien figures had entered the hallway running adjacent to the prison complex’s only apparent exit. Their stark white skin made them appear ghostly in the green luminescence lighting the room, and the minimalistic nature of their garments meant that little was left to the imagination. All three walked to the prison door with breasts bared and chests thrust out proudly, with only black thongs and high-heeled boots for covering. They had heads of long white hair, so thick and long that they looked more like wigs than natural hair. One of the women, taller than the other two, wore a bronze crown that contained the hair flowing out the back of it.

The trio reached the barred cell door, and the crowned one used a key to unlock it. Only then, as they threatened to cross the threshold, did Theron realize how poor a position he’d chosen to stay in. The short corridor to the next prison room was across the one he stood in, and that path lay directly in front of the women that were soon to enter. Making a run for it was possible, but that risked angering three aliens who may not otherwise have paid him any attention at all.

Theron pressed himself flat to the wall behind him, trying to appear as insignificant as possible as the women entered. Max looked in his direction, then at the door creaking open, and rose to his feet to do likewise on the wall to Theron’s left. The women entered, and the crowned one closed the door behind the group. Their attentions were uniformly fixed on him, which he hoped to be due to the fact that he and Max were the only two prisoners who hadn't left the room the moment they'd seen the aliens approaching.

Then, they walked towards him - and his stomach sank. Each click of their heels brought more sweat to his palms and quickened his heartbeat until it felt as if it were trying to break through his ribcage. He wanted to sit down and curl up as Max had, but didn't dare move a muscle as the group approached him.

They spoke in hushed tones, one after the other, without taking their eyes off of him. Despite that, it was clear from the angling of their heads and the calm derision in their voices that they were talking  _ about  _ him, and not  _ to  _ him. The closest woman, the shortest of the three, was still a head taller than him by virtue of her heeled boots. She had small, bone-colored piercings through her nipples, but that was as close to a weapon she carried. Despite that, he knew from his brief experiences with these creatures that she did not need a blade to end his life.

"Lo'neich da reim!"

She thrust a finger at the ground. Theron followed it to the cobblestones at his feet, saw nothing, and looked back up. The impatient expression on her face darkened, and she took hold of his face before slamming the back of his head into the wall.

The room exploded in white light, and he felt the scrape of his back against the wall, along with the impact of his buttocks hitting the ground. The shock of his brain being rattled in his skull numbed him to the pain of the fall, but he retained enough awareness to try and fight back as his pants were yanked off, dragging him away from the wall and dropping his head and back to the floor. The second of the aliens, whose skin was so pale as to appear an icey blue, knelt behind his head and held his arms down amidst fits of cackling. Her hands were cold and wet, and if it weren’t for the incredible strength pinning him to the ground, he might have thought that a dead body had fallen atop his shoulders.

All three shouted to each other in between raucous laughter as the woman who’d stripped his pants off slid atop his lap and squeezes his hips with the inside of her thighs. The crowned alien stood watching with hands on her hips, content to watch their crime from a distance. Behind her, Max took a tentative step towards the pair, trembling arm outstretched and eyes welling with tears.

“Leave him alone!” he shouted.

The standing alien spun about on her heels, stalked towards Max, and delivered a lightning-fast punch to the gut that doubled the young man over and sent him staggering backwards. Max took a few stumbling steps towards the wall amidst wheezing gasps, then collapsed to the floor and curled up clutching his stomach. Theron thrust his hips up and to the side to try and buck off the woman straddling him, but grinding against the surprisingly heavy alien’s crotch only drew a chorus of laughter from her and her friends. It didn’t take long for her to tire of that, however, and she grabbed hold of Theron’s cheeks, placed her yellow-black eyes a foot from his, and snarled a threat made comprehensible by the hand applying a painful amount of pressure to his balls.

Theron stopped fighting, dropped his head to the ground, and tried to quell the rising sickness in his gut as calloused fingers slipped into his underwear and massaged his soft cock. All of the violent carousing of the prior moments faded away, allowing him to hear with terrible clarity the little sounds that made his stomach churn worse than any cruel laughter. The panting of the woman holding his arms down. The deep, humming moans of the one grinding her groin against his. The rattling of the crowned woman’s heeled boot against the stone as she slipped a hand into her underwear and a finger into her sex.

And worst of all, Max’s choking gasps as he lay curled behind the trio. It was a small mercy that he was facing away from what was happening. Theron closed his eyes in an attempt to block out some small part of the experience, but quickly found himself overwhelmed by those senses that remained. The woman restraining his arms placed her folded legs atop his shoulders, freeing her own hands and exposing him to her womanly scent. It brought to mind the sort of loving experiences he'd shared over his life which he hated to have tainted by this nightmare. The feel of her dead flesh on his reminded him that he was not dealing with human beings, but with creatures whose proximity to his own kind made their alien depravity all the more sickening.

After a minute spent fondling his manhood to little effect, the woman atop him snorted in disgust and withdrew her hand. Theron had wondered what his reaction would be, and grew fearful at the knowledge that his brain and body were not of a single mind. Here, however, they seemed to be in agreement. She said something to her kneeling compatriot, who twisted her body atop him before handing something small off to the other alien.

A small, glass thimble appeared in the hand of the woman seated on his lap. She licked the tip of her index finger, emptied the violet powder inside the thimble atop the slick digit, then extended it towards Theron's face. He twisted his head to the side to avoid her attempts to shove it in his face, but the kneeling alien squeezed his head with her knees and held his mouth shut with one hand. The finger slowly pushed into his nostril, and with no choice left to him but to breathe through his nose, he inhaled.

No drug had ever hit him so fast, so hard, and with such an expansiveness of effect that it seemed to travel more quickly than the blood vessels that carried it throughout his body. His head pulsed, his muscles ached, and a pounding heart rushed blood into his every extremity. The limp cock between his legs throbbed in time with his pulse, becoming larger and harder with each grinding push of the alien's buttocks across his crotch. Her wetness seaped around her thong and soaked his own underwear, bathing his aching erection in a warmth that had never before been a terrifying thing.

The woman atop him got on her knees and fished his erect cock out through the fly of his underwear, then pushed her thong aside and lowered herself down so that his head passed just inside the lips of her pussy. Everything about her felt so human - the warmth, the wetness, the weight of her body on his - but behind that cruel grin and those predatory eyes lurked an intelligence he knew that he would never understand.

She lowered herself down, taking his length inside of her with a shuddering gasp that reached a crescendo as her buttocks pressed down on his hips. His mind reeled from the violent mixture of hatred and shame washing over him, driven to unimaginable intensities by the effects of the drug which had thrown wide open the gates of sensory input. Each undulating movement of the woman riding him was like being thrown about by an ocean wave, and he felt as if he might drown under the horror of it all.

Behind her, the crowned woman collapsed to the ground and continued to finger herself without missing a beat. Her eyes were rolled back so far that no color was visible within the black sclera, and Theron looked up to his rapist to see that hers were no different. The woman kneeling atop his arms trembled with with spasms so violent that she slid on and off his face with each buck of her hips. After grinding the cold wetness of her deadened sex across his nose a few times, she stammered something to her friend and scooted forward far enough to sit atop his face without extending her back.

The sensation was the most repulsive he'd ever experienced - worse even than the lithe alien gyrating atop his own unnatural hard cock. It was as if someone had gutted a fish, spread the two halves, and pressed his face into the center. The smell wasn't much better than that, either.

Theron wrenched his head to the side, gagging and gasping for air against the fatless, muscular thigh pressing against the side of his face. He wanted to puke, and scream, and kill, and die all at once - but in the chaos of the moment, could do little more than cope with the onslaught being inflicted on his senses. With each new rarefied peak of disgust that he reached, the three women likewise became more uncontrolled in their behavior, degenerating from rhythmic up-and-down movements into.short, spastic thrusts that drove into his hips with a painful amount of force. He could not see their faces with his own being blocked, but the animalistic sounds they made had him picturing drooling, fiendish wrecks that would just as soon tear him apart as inflict this mental anguish on him.

The woman riding his cock let out a warbling howl that was accompanied by a short series of thrusts that rubbed the tightness of her insides against the underside of her cock in a way that drove an unwanted sensation of growing warmth in his groin. Her hands slid under his shirt, and she raked her nails up and down in senseless patterns, tearing flesh and drawing blood wherever they travelled. He let out a muffled scream into the thigh beside his face, desperately attempting to stifle the moan that threatened to escape his lips as the pleasure welling in his groin exploded in a thunderous climax. His hips, which until then had been drawn into the floor, drove upward in an unwilling movement that drove him further still into the depths of shame.

Her breasts settled atop his chest, and she dug the nails of both hands deep into his sides until they would not go any further. The pain, which he had already endured so much of, was the least of the torture. And he did not have to feel bad about the simple thoughts it gave rise to. It was straightforward and grounding, and he was thankful for it in that moment.

Then, just as all nightmares do, it ended. The two women staggered off of him, and he was back in the simpler horror of an alien prison on an unknown world. The one who had fucked him leaned over and swatted him in the balls, making him gasp in pain and draw his legs up in a defensive posture as he rolled onto his side. The women who had been riding his face laughed at the sight, but her own cruel joy was cut short when her compatriot slipped a finger into her pussy, drew out some of what she had taken from Theron, and flicked it at the other woman.

The three women left, talking and shoving each other as they walked, their laughter continuing until they had locked the prison door and passed far from the adjoining hallway. It was a long time still before the echoes of their laughter faded from Theron's mind. When it finally did, he slept - and dreamt of better places, and better times.

  
  



End file.
